I 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



HMr. WELLS has also written the 
following novels: 

LOVE AND MK. LEWISMAM 

KIPPS 

MR. POLLY 

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 

ANN VERONICA 

TONO BUNGAY 

MARRIAGE 

BEALBV 

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS 

THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN 

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP 

JOAN AND PETER 

THE UNDYING FIRE 

% The following fantastic and imagina- 
tive romances: 

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 

THE TIME MACHINE 

THE WONDERFUL VISIT 

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU 

THE SEA LADY 

THE SLEEPER AWAKES 

THE FOOD OF THE GODS 

THE WAR IN THE AIR 

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

And numerous Short Stories now collected in 
One Volume under the title of 
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 

H A Series of books upon Social, Reli- 
gious and Political questions: 

ANTICIPATIONS (1900) 

MANKIND IN THE MAKING 

FIRST AND LAST THINGS 

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 

A MODERN UTOPIA 

THE FUTURE IN AMERICA 

AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE 
WORLD 

WHAT IS COMING? 

WAR AND THE FUTURE 

IN THE FOURTH YEAR 

GOD THE INVISIBLE KING 

RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS 

THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION 

IF And two little books about children's 
play, called: 

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS 




THE OUTLINE OF 
HISTORY 

Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind 



BY 

H. G. WELLS 



WRITTEN ORIGINALLY WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF 

MR. ERNEST BARKER, 

SIR H. IT. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY LANKESTER, 

AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY 



AND ILLUSTRATED BY 

J. F. HORRABIN 



THE THIRD EDITION 
Revised and Rearranged by the Author 



^ehj |9orb 

THP] JMACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






%\ 



Copyright, 1920 and 1921, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Copyright, 1920 and 1921, 
By H. G. wells. 



Set up and clectrotyped. Published November, 1920. 
Third Edition revised and rearranged September, 1921. 



INTRODUCTION 

"A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy 
of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to 
the earth, must he charged with the conviction that all 
existence is one — a single conception sustained from he- 
ginning to end upon one identical law." 

— Friedrich Katzel. 

THIS Outline of History, of which this is a third edition, 
freshly revised and rearranged, is an attempt to tell, 
truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole 
story of life and mankind so far as it is known to-day. It is 
written plainly for the general reader, but its aim goes beyond 
its use as merely interesting reading matter. There is a feeling 
abroad that the teaching of history considered as a part of gen- 
eral education is in an unsatisfactory condition, and particu- 
larly that the ordinary treatment of this "subject" by the class 
and teacher and examiner is too partial and narrow. But the 
desire to extend the general range of historical ideas is con- 
fronted by the argument that the available time for instruction 
is already consumed by that partial and narrow treatment, and 
that therefore, however desirable this extension of range may 
be, it is in practice impossible. If an Englishman, for example, 
has found the history of England quite enough for his powers 
of assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and 
daughters to master universal history, if that is to consist of 
the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the 
history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on. To 
which the only possible answer is that universal history is at 
once something more and something less than the aggregate 
of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that it 
must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a 
different manner. This- book seeks to justify that answer. It 
has been written primarily to show that history as one whole 
is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than 
is the history of special nations and periods, a broader handling 



vi INTRODUCTION 

tliat will bring it within the normal limitations of time and 
energy set to the reading and education of an ordinary citizen. 
This outline deals with ages and races and nations, where the 
ordinary history deals with reigns and pedigrees and campaigns; 
bui it will not be found to be more crowded with names and 
dates, nor more difficult to follow and understand. History is 
no exception amongst the sciences ; as the gaps fill in, the out- 
line simplifies ; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude 
of details dissolves into general laws. And many topics of quite 
primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth 
of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human 
life, the elaboration of the ideas of money and credit, or the 
story of the origins and spread and infiuence of Christianity, 
which must be treated fragmentarily or by elaborate digressions 
in any partial history, arise and flow completely and naturally 
in one general record of the world in which we live. 

The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of 
human history throughout the world has become very evident 
during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter 
means of communication have brought all men closer to one 
another for good or for evil. War becomes a universal disaster, 
blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its 
cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non-combatant 
and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a 
common peace in all the world ; no prosperity but a general 
prosperity. But there can he no common peace and prosperity 
ivithout common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold 
them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but nar- 
row, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and 
peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This 
truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a 
century or more ago — it is the gist of his tract upon universal 
peace — is now plain to the man in the street. Our internal 
policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly 
vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin 
and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history 
as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for 
peace within as it is for peace between the nations. 

The writer will offer no apology for making this experiment. 
His disqualifications are manifest. But such work needs to be 
done- by as many people as possible, he was free to make his 



INTRODUCTION vii 

contribution, and he was greatly attracted by the task. He 
has read sedulously and made the utmost use of all the help 
he could obtain. There is not a chapter that has not been 
examined by some more competent person than himself and 
very carefully revised. He has particularly to thank his friends 
Sir E. Kay Lankester, Sir H. H. Johnston, Professor Gilbert 
Murray, and Mr. Ernest Barker for much counsel and direc- 
tion and editorial help. Mi'. Philip Guedalla has toiled most 
efficiently and kindly through all the proofs. Mr. A. Allison, 
Professor T. W. Aniold, Mr. Arnold Bennett, the Rev. A. H. 
Trevor Benson, Mr. Aodh de Blacam, Mr. Laurence Binyon, 
the Rev. G. W. Broomfield, Sir William Bull, Mr. L. Cranraer 
Byng, Mr. A. J. D. Campbell, Mr. A. Y. Campbell, Mr. L. Y. 
Ciien, Mr. A. R. Cowan, Mr. O. G. S. Crawford, Dr. W. S. 
Culbertson, Mr. 11. Langton Cole, Mr. B. G. Collins, Mr. 
J. J. L. Duyvendak, Mr. O. W. Ellis, Mr. G. S. Ferrier, Mr. 
David Freeman, Mr. S. N. Fu, Mr. G. B. Gloyne, Sir Richard 
Gregory, Mr. F. II. Hayward, Mr. Sydney Herbert, Dr. Fr. 
Krupicka, Mr. H. Lang Jones, Mr. C. H. B. Laughton, Mr. 
B. I. Macalpin, Mr. G.^H. Mair, Mr. F. S. Marvin, Mr. J. S. 
Mayhew, Mr. B. Stafford Morse, Professor J. L. Myres, the 
Hon. W. Ormsby-Gore, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. R. I. Pocock, 
Mr. J. Pringle, Mr. W. H. R. Rivers, Sir Denison Ross, Dr. 
E. J. Russell, Dr. Charles Singer, Mr. A. St. George Sanford, 
Dr. C. O. Stallybrass, Mr. G. H. Walsh, Mr. G. P. Wells, Miss 
Rebecca West, and Mr. George Whale have all to be thanked for 
help, either by reading parts of the MS. or by pointing out 
errors in the published parts, making suggestions, answering 
questions or giving advice. Numerous other helpful corre- 
spondents have pointed out "printer's errors and minor slips in 
the serial publication which preceded the book edition, and 
they have added many useful items of information, and to those 
writers also the warmest thanks are due. Mr. C. M. Anton 
Belaiew, Mr. Henrv Coates, Mr. J. A. Corry, Mr. Archibald 
Craig, Mr. W. V. Cruden, Mr. A. H. Dodd,' Mr. T. B. Gold- 
smith, Mr. F. E. Green, Mr. F. S. Hare, Mr. Homer B. Hul- 
bert, Mr. Walter Ingleby, Mr. J. II. Leviton, Mr. H. Comyn 
Maitland, Mr. Karsten' Meyer, Mr. William Piatt, Mr. F. 
Gordon Roe, Mr. Alden Sampson, Mr. Neville H. Smith, Mr. 
M. Timur, Mr. W. H. Thompson, Mr. A. J. Vogan, Mr. W. A. 
Voss, Mr. G. F. Wates, and one or two correspondents with 



viii INTRODUCTION 

illegible signatures, have made valuable suggestions since the 
publication of the second edition. Pamphlets against the Out- 
line by Mr. Gomme and Dr. Downey have also been useful in 
this later revision. But of course none of these helpers are to 
be held responsible for the judgments, tone, arrangement or 
writing of this Outline. In the relative importance of the 
parts, in the moral and political implications of the story, the 
final decision has necessarily fallen to the writer. The problem 
of illustrations was a very difficult one for him, for he had 
had no previous experience in the production of an illustrated 
book. In Mr. J. F. Horrabin he has had the good fortune to 
find not only an illustrator but a collaborator. Mr. Horrabin 
has spared no pains to make this work informative and exact. 
His maps and drawings are a part of the text, the most vital 
and decorative part. Some of them represent the reading and 
inquiry of many laborious days. 

The index to this edition is the work of Mr. Strickland Gib- 
son of Oxford. Several correspondents have asked for a pro- 
nouncing index and accordingly this has been provided. 

The writer owes a word of thanks to that living index of 
printed books, Mr. J. F. Cox of the London Library. He 
would also like to acknowledge here the help he has received 
from Mrs. Wells. Without her labour in typing and re^typing 
the drafts of the various chapters as they have been revised and 
amended, in checking references, finding suitable quotations, 
hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole mass 
of material for this history, and without her constant help and 
watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible. 

H. G. Wells. 



SCHEME OP CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chaptek I. The Earth in Space and Time 1 

Chapter II. The Record of the Rocks 

§ I. The first living- things .5 

§2. How old is the world? ........ 10 

Chapter III. Natural Selection and the Changes of Species . 13 

Chapter IV. The Invasion of the Dry Land by Life 

§ 1. Life and water 19 

§2. The earliest animals 21 

Chapter V. The Age of Reptiles — 

§ 1. The age of lowland life 25 

§2. Flying dragons .29 

§ 3. The first birds . . 30 

§ 4. An age of hardship and death . . . ,. . 32 

§ 5. The first appearance of fur and feathers ... .34 

Chapter VI. The Age of Mammals 

§ 1. A new age of life .37 

§ 2. Tradition comes into the world .38 

§ 3. An age of brain growth .42 

§ 4. The world grows hard again . » • . . .44 

Chapter VTI. The Ancestry of Man 

§ 1. Man descended from a walking ape .... .46 

§ 2. First traces of man-like creatures ..... 51 

§3. The Heidelberg sub-man 52 

§ 4. The Piltdown sub-man ....... .53 

Chapter VIII. The Neanderthal Men, an Extinct Race. (The 
Early Pal.*:olitiiic Age) 

§ 1. The world 50,000 j-ears ago 55 

§2. The daily life of tlie first men 59 

Chapter IX. The Lateij Postglacial Pal.icolithic Men, the First 
True Men. (Later Pal-eolithxc Agej 

§1. The coming of men like ourselves 65 

§ 2. Hunters give place to herdsmen ..... .74 

§ 3. No sub-men in America 75 

i.x 



SCHEME OF CONTENTS 



Chapter X. Neolithic Man in Europe 
§ 1. The age of cultivation begins 
§2. Wliere did the Neolithic culture arise? 
§ 3. Everyday Neolithic life 
§ 4. Primitive trade ..... 
§ 5. The flooding of the Mediterranean valley 

Chapter XI. Early Thought 

§ 1. Primitive philosophy .... 

§2. The Old Man in religion . 
Fear and hope in religion 

Stars and seasons 

Story-telling and myth-making 
Complex origins of religion . 



§3. 
§4. 
§5. 



Chapter XII. The Races of Mankind 

§ 1. Is mankind still differentiating? . 

§ 2. The main races of mankind 

§ 3. The Heliolithic culture of the Brunet peopk 

Chapter XIII. The Languages of Mankind 

§ 1. No one primitive language . 

§ 2. The Aryan languages 

§ 3. The Semitic languages 

§ 4. The Hamitic languages 

§ 5. The Ural-Altaic languages 

§ 6. The Chinese languages 

§ 7. Other language groups 

§ 8. A possible primitive language group 

§ 9. Some isolated languages 

CHAPTiai XIV. The First Civilizations 
§ 1. Early cities and early nomads 
§ 2a. The Sumerians 
§ 2b. The empire of Sargon the First 
§ 2c. The empire of Hammurabi . 
§ 2d. The Assyrians and their empire 
§ 2e. The Chaldean empire . 
§ 3. The early history of Egypt . 
§ 4. The early civilization of India 
§ 5. The early history of China . 
§ 6. While the civilizations were growing 

Chapter XV. Sea Peoples and Trading Peoples 
§ 1. The earliest ships and sailors 
§ 2. The ^gean cities before history . 



97 
99 
100 

106 
110 
111 

117 
118 
120 
121 
123 
123 
124 
127 
129 

131 
135 
137 
137 
138 
140 
141 
147 
147 
152 

155 
158 



SCHEME OF CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

§ 3. The first voyages of exploration ...... 162 

§4. Early traders 164 

§5. Early travellers 166 

Chapter XVI. Writing 

§ 1. Picture writing 168 

§2. Syllable writing 171 

§3. Alphabet writing 172 

§ 4. The place of writing in human life 173 

Chapter XVII. Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings 

§ 1. The priest conies into history 177 

§ 2. Priests and the stars 181 

§ 3. Priests and the dawn of learning 184 

§ 4. King against priests 185 

§ 5. How Bel-IMarduk struggled against the kings . . . 188 

§6. The god-kings of Egypt 191 

§ 7. Shi Hwang-ti destroys the books ..... 195 

Chapter XVIII. Serfs, Slaves, Social Classes, and Free In- 
dividuals 

§ 1. The common man in ancient times ..... 196 

§2. The earliest slaves 198 

§ 3. The first "independent" persons ...... 201 

§ 4. Social classes three thousand years ago .... 204 

§ 5. Classes hardening into castes 207 

§ 6. Caste in India 210 

§ 7. The system of the Mandarins 212 

§ 8. A summary of five thousand years 214 

Chapter XIX. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Prophets 

§ 1. The place of the Israelites in history . . . . . 217 

§ 2. Saul, David, and Solomon 225 

§ 3. The Jews a people of mixed origin ..... 230 

§ 4. The importance of the Hebrew prophets .... 232 

Chapter XX. The Aryan-speaking Peoples in Prehistoric Times 

§ 1. The spreading of the Aryan-speakers ..... 236 

§ 2. Primitive Aryan life . . 240 

§ 3. Early Aryan daily life 245 

Chapter XXI. The Greeks and the Persians 

§ 1. The Hellenic peoples 252 

§ 2. Distinctive features of the Hellenic civilization . . . 255 

§ 3. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in Greece . . 258 

§ 4. The kingdom of Lydia 265 

§ 5. The rise of the Persians in the East 266 

§6. The story of Croesus 270 



SCHEME OF CONTENTS 



§9. 
§10. 

Chapter 
§1- 
§2. 
§3. 
§4. 
§5. 
§6. 

Chapter 

§1- 
§2. 
§3. 
§4. 
§5. 
§6. 
§7. 



Chapter 


§1- 


§2. 


§3. 


Chapter 


§1- 


§2. 


§3. 


§4. 


§5- 


§6. 


§7. 


Chapter 


§1- 


§2. 


§3. 


§4. 


§5. 


§6. 


§7. 



PAGE 

Darius invades Russia 274 

The battle of Marathon 280 

Thermopyla? and Salamis 282 

Plataja and Mycale . ..... 288 

XXII. Greek Thought its-^ Relatiox to Human Society 

The Athens of Pericles . .291 

Socrates 298 

Plato and the Academy 299 

Aristotle and the Lyceum 301 

Philosophy becomes unworkliy 303 

The quality and lim.itatior.s of Greek thought . . . 304 

XXIII. The Career of Alexander the Great 

Philip of Macedonia 310 

The murder of King Philip 315 

Alexander's first conquests 319 

The wanderings of Alexander 327 

Was Alexander indeed great? .331 

The successors of Alexander 337 

Pergamum a refuge of culture 338 

Alexander as a portent of world unity ..... 340 

XXTV. Science and Religion at Alexandria 

The science of Alexandria . . . . . . . 342 

Philosophy of Alexandria 349 

Alexandria as a factory of religions ..... 349 

XXV. The Rise and Spkiiiad of Buddhism 

The story of Gautama ........ . 354 

Teacliing and legend in conllict ...... 359 

The gospel of Gautama Buddha ...... 3(51 

Buddhism and Asoka . 365 

Two great Chinese teachers . . . . . . .371 

The corruptions of Buddhism 376 

The present range of Buddliism . . . . . .378 

XXVI. The Two Westkrn Republics 

The beginnings of the Latins ...... 380 

A new sort of state ........ 388 

The Carthaginian republic of rich men .... 399 

The First Punic War . . . .„ . . . .400 

Cato the Elder and the spirit of Cato 404 

The Second Punic V\^ar . 407 

The Third Punic War 412 

How the Punic War undermined Roman liberty . . . 417 

Comparison of the Roman republic with a modern state . 418 



SCHEME OF CONTENTS 



Chapter XXVII. Froji Tiberius Gracchus to the God-Emperor 
IN Rome 

§ 1. The science of tli waiting tlie common man .... 424 

§ 2. Finance in tlie Roman state 427 

§3. The last years of republican politics ..... 429 

§ 4. The era of the adventurer generals 435 

§5. The end of the republic 439 

§ 6. The comijig of the Princeps ....... 443 

§ 7. Why the Roman republic failed ...... 446 

Chapter XXVIII. The CtESArs between the Sea and the Gricat 
Plains of the Old World 
§ 1. A short catalogue of emperors .... 
§ 2. Roman civilization at its zenith .... 
§ 3. Limitations of the Roman mind .... 
§ 4. The stir of the great plains ..... 
§5. The Western (true Ronum) Empire crumples up 
§6. The Eastern (revived Hellenic) Empire 

Chapter XXIX. The Beginnings, the Rise, and the Divisions 

OF Christianity 
§ 1. Judea at the Christian era . . . . 
§ 2. Tlie teachings of Jesus of Nazareth 
§ 3. The universal religions .... 

§4. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth . 
§ 5. Doctrines added to the teachings of Jesus . 
§ 6. The struggles and persecutions of Christianity' 

Constantine the Great 

The establishment of official Christianity . 

The map of Europe, a.d. 500 

The salvation of learning by Christianity . 

XXX. Seven Centuries in Asia (circa 

A.D. 650) 

Justinian the Great .... 

The Sassanid empire in Persia 

The decay of S3'ria under the Sassanids 

The first message from Islam 

Zoroaster and Mani .... 

Hunnish peoples in central Asia, and India 

The great age of China .... 

Intellectual fetters of China 
§ 9. The travels of Yuan Chwang 
Chapter XXXI. Muhammad and Isla:u 

§ 1. Arabia before Muhammad ....,,. 567 

§ 2. Life of Muhammad to tlie Hegira ...... 570 

§ 3. Muhammad becomes a fighting prophet .... 574 



§7. 



§10. 
Chapter 

§1- 
§2. 
§3. 
§4. 
§5. 
§6. 
§7. 
8 8. 



JO 



451 

4.58 
4G7 
4G9 
480 

487 



493 
496 
505 
507 
509 
516 
520 
522 



526 
530 



535 
537 
540 
544 
545 
547 
550 
555 
561 



xiv SCHEME OF CONTENTS 



§ 4. The teachings of Islam .... 

§ 5. Tlie caliplis Abu Bekr and Omar 

§ 6. The great days of the Omayyads . 

§ 7. The decay of Ishim under the Abbasids 

8 8. The intellectual life of Arab Islam 



PAQB 

579 

582 
588 
596 
599 



CnAPTEB XXXII. Christendom and the Crusades 

§ 1. The Western world at its lowest ebb 605 

§2. The feudal system 607 

§ 3. The Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians . . . 61C 

§ 4. The Christianization of the western Itarbarians . . . 613 
§ 5. Charlemagne becomes emperor of the West . . . .619 

§ 6. The personality of Charlemagne 623 

§ 7. The French and the Germans become distinct . . . 626 
§ 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk 

Turks .628 

§ 9. How Constantinople appealed to Eome .... 637 

§ 10. The Crusades 640 

§ 11. The Crusades a test of Christianity 648 

§ 12. The Emperor Frederick II . 650 

§ 13. Defects and limitations of the papacy .... 654 

§ 14. A list of leading popes 660 

Chapter XXXIII. The Great Empire of Jengis Khan and his 
Successors (The Age of the Land Ways) 

§ 1. Asia at the end of the twelftli century .... 666 

§ 2. The rise and victories of the Mongols 609 

§ 3. The travels of Marco Polo 675 

§ 4. The Ottoman Turks and Constantinople .... 681 

§ 5. Why the Mongols were not Christianized .... 687 

§ 5a. Kublai Khan founds the Yuan dynasty .... 688 

§ 5b. The Mongols revert to tribalism 688 

§ 5c. The Kipchak empire and the Tsar of Muscovy . . . 688 

§5d. Timurlajie 690 

§ 5e. The Mongol empire of India 693 

§ 5f. The Mongols and the Gipsies 697 

Chapter XXXIV. The Renascence of Western Civilization 
(Land Ways Give Place to Sea Ways) 

§ 1. Christianity and popular education 699 

§ 2. Europe begins to think for itself 707 

§3. The Great Plague and the dawn of communism . . . 712 

§4. How paper liberated the human mind 717 

§ 5. Protestantism of the princes and Protestantism of the 

peoples 719 

8 6. The reawakening of science 725 



SCHEME OF CONTENTS 



XV 



§ 7. The new growth of European towns . 

§-8. America comes into history . 

§ 9. What Machiavelli thought of the world 
§ 10. The republic of Switzerland 
§ 11 A. The life of the Emperor Charles V . 
§ 11b. Protestants if the prince wills it . 
§ lie. The intellectual under-tow . 



Chapter XXXV. Princes, Parliaments, and Power? 

§ 1. Princes and foreign policy .... 

§2. The Dutch republic 

§3.. The English republic 

§ 4. The break-up and disorder of Germany 

§ 5. The splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe 

§ 6. The growth of the idea of Great Powers . 

§ 7. The crowned republic of Poland and its fate 

§ 8. The first scramble for empire overseas . 

§ 9. Britain dominates India .... 

§ 10. Russia's ride to the Pacific .... 

§ 11. What Gibbon thought of the world in 1780 . 

8 12. The social truce draws to an end 



PAGE 

734 
740 
749 
753 
754 
765 
765 



767 
769 
773 

783 
786 
793 



Chapter XXXVI. The New Democratic Republics of America 
AND France 
Inconveniences of the Great Power systeni .... 

The thirteen colonics before their revolt .... 

Civil war is forced upon the colonies ..... 

The War of Independence ....... 

The constitution of the United States ..... 

Primitive features of the United States constitution . 

Revolutionary ideas in France 

The Revolution of the year 1789 

The French "crowned republic" of 'S9-"91 . . . . 
The Revolution of the Jacobins ...... 

The Jacobin republic, 1792-94 

The Directory ........ 

The pause in reconstruction and the dawn of modern 



§1- 
§2. 
§3. 
§4. 



§7. 

§8. 

§9. 
§10. 
§11. 
§12. 
§13. 



Socialism 



Chapter XXXVII. The Career of Napoleon Bonaparte 

§ 1. The Bonaparte family in Corsica . 

§ 2. Bonaparte as a republican general 

§3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799-1804 

§ 4. Napoleon I Emperor, 1804-14 

§5. The Hundred Days .... 

§6. The map of Euroi^c in 1815 . 



801 
805 
809 
811 
818 



826 
828 
833 
838 
840 
847 
853 
856 
859 
866 
876 
881 

883 



892 
893 
898 
903 
911 
916 



xvi SCHEME OF CONTENTS 

PAGR 

Chapter XXXVIII. The Realities and Imaginations of the 
Nineteenth Century 

§ 1. The mechanical revolution 922 

§ 2. Relation of the meclianical to tlie industrial revolution . 931 

,§ 3. The fermentation of ideas, 1848 936 

§4. The development of the idea of Socialism .... 938 

§ 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a scheme of human society . 946 

§6. How Darwinism affected religious and political ideas . 951 

§ 7. The idea of Nationalism 959 

§8. Europe between 1848 and 1878 963 

§9. The (second) scramble for overseas empires . . . 977 

§ 10. The Indian precedent in Asia 987 

§11. The history of Japan 991 

§ 12. Close of the period of overseas expansion .... 996 

§ 13. The British Empire in 1914 997 

Chapter XXXIX. The International Catastrophe of 1914 

§ 1. The armed peace before the Great War .... 1000 

§2. Imperial Germany 1002 

§3. The spirit of Imperialism in Britain and Ireland . . 1011 

§ 4. Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans . . . 1023 

§5. Russia still a Grand Monarchy in 1914 .... 1025 

§ 6. The United States and the Imperial idea .... 1027 

§ 7. The immediate causes of the Great War .... 1031 

§ 8. A summary of the Great War up to 1917 .... 1036 

§ 9. The Great War from the Russian collapse to the armistice 1046 

§ 10. The political, economic, and social disorganization caused 

by the Great War 1053 

§11. Presddent Wilson and the problems of Versailles . . . 1061 

§ 12. Summary of the first Covenant of the League of Nations 1072 

§ 13. A general outline of the treaties of 1919 and 1020 . . 1076 

§ 14. A forecast of the next war 1081 

Chapter XL. The Next Stage of PIistory 

§ 1. The possible unification of men's wills in political matters 1086 

§2. How a Federal World Government may come about . . 1090 

§ 3. Some fundamental characteristics of a modern world state 1092 

§ 4. What this world might be were it under one law and justice 1094 

A Chroxological Table from 800 b.c. to 1920 1102 

Five Time Charts of the World's Affairs from 1000 b.c. to 

A.D. 1920 1122 

Index 1127 



LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Life in the Early Palseozoic .9 

Time Chart from earliest life to present age II 

Life in the Later PaUrozoic Age .16 

Australian Lung Fish .22 

Some Reptiles of the Later Palaeozoic Age .23 

Some Mesozoic Reptiles .27 

Later Mesozoic Reptiles .30 

Pterodactyls and Archacopteryx .31 

Hcspcrornis .35 

Some Oligocene Mammalg .39 

Miocene Mammals . . . . . . . . . .41 

Time Diagram of the Glacial Ages 47 

Early Pleistocene Animals, contemporary witli Earliest Man . . 48 

The Sub-Man Pithecanthropus 49 

Map of Europe and Western Asia 50,000 Years Ago .... 56 

Neanderthal Man . . . ' .58 

Early Stone Implements 60 

Australia and the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age ... 62 

Cro-magnon Man 66 

Europe and Western Asia in the Later PahTolithic Age ... 68 

Reindeer Age Articles 69 

A Reindeer Age Masterpiece .72 

Reindeer Age Engravings and Carvings .73 

Neolithic Implements .79 

Pott«ry from Lake Dwellings 82 

Hut Urns 86 

A Menhir of the Neolitliic Period 98 

Bronze Age Implements 101 

Diagram showing the Duration of the Neolithic Period . . . 103 

Heads of Australoid Types 109 

Bushwoman Ill 

Negro Types .112 

Mongolian Types 113 

Caucasian Types 113 

Map of Europe, Asia. Africa 15,000 Years Ago 114 

The Swastika . . . 115 

Relationship of Human Races (Diagrammatic Summary) . . . 116 

xvii __ 



xviii LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAOB 

Possible Relationship of Languages 122 

Racial Types (after Champollion) 128 

The Cradle of Western Civilization 133 

Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx 136 

Assyrian Warrior {temp. Sargon II) 139 

Time Chart 6000 B.C. to A.D 142 

Egyptian Hippopotamus Goddess 143 

The Cradle of Chinese Civilization (Map) 149 

Boats on Nile, 2500 b.c 157 

Egyptian Ship on Red Sea, 1250 B.c 158 

^gean Civilization (Map) 160 

A Votary of the Snake Goddess 161 

American Indian Picture-Writing 171 

Egyptian Gods — Set, Anubis, Typhoii, Bcs 179 

Egyptian Gels — Tlioth-lunus, Hathor, Clincmu 182 

An Assyrian King and his Chief Minister 186 

Pharaoh Chephren 190 

Pharaoh Ramescs III as Osiris (Sarcophagus relief) . . . 192 

Pharaoh Akhnaton 194 

Egyptian Peasants (Pyramid Age) 199 

Brawl among Egyptian Boatmen (Pyramid Age) .... 201 

Egyptian Social Types (from Tombs) 203 

The Land of the Hebrews 219 

Aryan-speaking Peoples 1000-500 B.C. (Map) 237 

Combat between Menelaus and Hector 246 

Archaic Horses and Chariots 247 

Hellenic Races 1000-800 B.C. (Map) 253 

Greek Sea Fight, 550 b.c 254 

Athenian Warship, 400 b.c. 257 

Scythian Types 269 

Median and Second Babylonian Empires (in Nebuchadnezzar's Reign) 270 

The Empire of Darius 276 

Wars of the Greeks and Persians (Map) 280 

Athenian Foot-soldier 282 

Persian Body-guard (from Frieze at Susa) ..... 286 

The World according to Herodotus 287 

Athene of the Parthenon 296 

Philip of Macedon 311 

Growth of Macedonia under Philip 313 

Macedonian Warrior (Bas-relief from Pella) ..... 316 

Campaigns of Alexander the Great 323 

Alexander the Great 333 

Break-up of Alexander's Empire 335 

Seleucus I 336 



LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xix 

PAGE 

Later State of Alexander's Empire 339 

The World according to Eratosthenes, 200 B.c 844 

The Known World, 250 b.c 346 

Isis and Horns .351 

Serapis 352 

The Rise of Buddhism . . .358 

Hariti 366 

Cliinese Image of Kuan-yin 369 

The Spread of Buddhism 370 

Indian Gods — Vishnu, Brahma, Siva 374 

Indian Gods — Krishna, Kali, Ganesa 377 

The Western Mediterranean, 800-600 b.c 381 

Early Latium 382 

Burning the Dead: Etruscan Ceremony 384 

Statuette of a Gaul 385 

Roman Power after the Samnite Wars 386 

Italy after 275 b.c 387 

Roman Coin Celebrating the Victory over Pyrrhus .... 389 

Mercury 391 

Carthaginian Coins 400 

Roman As 404 

Rome and its Alliances, 150 B.c 414 

Gladiators . . . ■ 421 

Roman Power, 50 B.c 438 

Julius Caesar ... 442 

Roman Empire at Death of Augustus 448 

Roman Empire in Time of Trajan 453 

Asia and Europe: Life of the Period (Map) , . . . .471 

Central Asia, 200-100 B.c 477 

Tracks of Migrating and Raiding Peoples, a.d. 1-700 .... 483 

Eastern Roman Empire 488 

Constantinople (Map to sliow value of its position) .... 490 

Galilee 495 

Map of Europe, A.D. 500 529 

The Eastern Empire and the Sassanids 541 

Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia 543 

Ephthalite Coin , . . . .549 

Chinese Empire, Tang Dynasty 552 

Yuan Chwang's Route from China to India 562 

Arabia and Adjacent Countries 569 

The Beginnings of Moslem Power 583 

The Growth of Moslem Pover in 25 Years 587 

The Moslem Empire, a.d. 750 590 

Europe, a.d. 500 609 



XX LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Frankiah Dominions in the Time of Cliarles Martel , . . ,611 

England, a.d. 640 615 

England, a.d. 878 617 

Europe at the Death of Charlemagne 620 

France at the Close of 10th Century 629 

Empire of Otto the Great 633 

The Coming of the Seljuks (Map) 634 

The First Crusade (Map) 641 

Europe and Asia, 1200 668 

Empire of Jengis Khan, 1227 671 

Travels of Marco Polo • 676 

Ottoman Empire, 1453 . .684 

Ottoman Empire, 1566 686 

Empire of Timurlane . 692 

Europe at the Fall of Constantinoi)le • 701 

"We have the payne . . ." John Ball's Speech ..... 714 

Ignatius of Loyola 722 

European Trade Routes in the 14th Century ..... 738 

The Chief Voyages of Exploration up to 1522 745 

Mexico and Peru 748 

Switzerland 753 

Europe in the Time of Charles V 756 

Martin Luther 757 

Francis I 759 

Henry VIII 760 

Charles V . 761 

Central Europe, 1648 784 

Louis XIV .787 

Europe in 1714 790 

The Partitions of Poland 800 

Britain, France and Spain in America, 1750 804 

Chief Foreign Settlements in India, 17th Century .... 807 

India in 1750 810 

American Colonies, 1760 830 

Boston in 1775 . 837 

U.S.A. in 1790 841 

The U.S.A., showing Dates of the Chief Territorial Extenaioiis . . 845 

Benjamin Franklin 849 

George Washington 850 

The Flight to Varennes (Map) ' . .867 

North Eastern Frontier of France, 1792 874 

Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign 897 

Napoleon as Emperor 904 

Tsar Alexander I 906 



LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS xxi 

PAGE 

Napoleon's Empire, 1810 908 

Trail of Napoleon .912 

Europe after the Congress of Vienna ....... 918 

The Natural Political Map of Europe . . . . . .921 

Tribal gods of the 19th Century 961 

Map of Europe, 1848-1871 966 

Italy, 1861 967 

Bismarck 970 

The Balkans, 1878 974 

Comparative Maps of Asia under different projections :. . . 976 

The British Empire in 1315 978 

Africa in the Middle of 19th Century ....... 985 

Africa, 1914 986 

Japan and the East Coast of Asia 995 

Overseas Empires of European Powers, 1914 ..... 999 

Emperor ^Yilliam II 1006 

Ireland 1016 

The Balkan States, 1913 1024 

The Original German Plan, 1914 1035 

The Western Front, 1915-18 1039 

Time Chart of the Great War, 1914-18 1052-53 

President Wilson . 1066 

M. Clemenceau 1067 

Mr. Lloyd George 1068 

Germany after the Peace Treaty, 1919 1075 

The Turkish Treaty, 1920 1077 

The Break-up of Austria-Hungary 1079 

Time Chart 1000 B.C.-300 b.c 1122 

400 B.c.-A.D. 300 1123 

A.D. 200-A.D. 900 1124 

A.D. 800-A.n. IIOO 1125 

A.D. 1220-A.D. 1920 . .1126 



EDUCATIONAL EDITION 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

I 

THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME 

THE earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast 
though it seems to ns, it is a mere speck of matter in 
the greater vastness of space. 

Space is, for the most part, emptiness. At great intervals 
there are in this emptiness flaring centres of heat and light, 
the "fixed stars." They are all moving about in space, not- 
withstanding that they are called fixed stars, but for a long 
time men did not realize their motion. They are so vast and 
at such tremendous distances that their motion is not per- 
ceived. Only in the course of many thousands of years is it 
appreciable. These fixed stars are so far off that, for all their 
immensity, they seem to be, even when we look at them through 
the most powerful telescopes, mere points of light, brighter 
or less bright. A few, however, when we turn a telescope upon 
them, are seen to be whirls and clouds of shining vapour 
which we call nebulae. They are so far off that a movement of 
millions of miles would be imperceptible. 

One star, however, is so near to us that it is like a great ball 
of flame. This one is the sun. The sun is itself in its nature 
like a fixed star, but it differs from the other fixed stars in 
appearance because it is beyond comparison nearer than they 
are ; and because it is nearer men have been able to learn some- 
thing of its nature. Its mean distance from the earth is 
ninety-three million miles. It is a mass of flaming matter, hav- 
ing a diameter of 866,000 miles. Its bulk is a million and 
a quarter times the bulk of our earth. 

These are difficult figures for the imagination. If a bullet 
fired from a Maxim gun at the sun kept its muzzle velocity 
unimpaired, it would take seven years to reach the sun. And 

1 



2 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

yet we say the sun is near, measured by the scale of the stars. 
If the earth were a small ball, one inch in diameter, the sun 
would be a globe of nine feet diameter ; it would fill a small 
bedroom. It is spinning round on its axis, but since it is an in- 
candescent fluid, its polar regions do not travel with the same 
velocity as its equator, the surface of which rotates in about 
twenty-five days. The surface visible to us consists of clouds 
of incandescent metallic vapour. x\t what lies below we can 
only guess. So hot is the sun's atmosphere that iron, nickel, 
copper, and tin are present in it in a gaseous state. About 
it at great distances circle not only our earth, but certain 
kindred bodies called the planets. These shine in the sky 
because they reflect the light of the sun ; they are near enough 
for us to note their movements quite easily. Night by night 
their positions change with regard to the fixed stars. 

It is well to understand how empty is space. If, as we have 
said, the sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in 
proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance 
of 323 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the 
size of a small pea, thirty inches from the earth. Nearer 
to the sun than the earth would be two other very similar specks, 
the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of 125 and 250 
yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets 
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances of 
500, 1,680, 3,000, 6,000, and 9,500 yards respectively. There 
would also be a certain number of very much smaller specks, 
flying about amongst these planets, more particularly a num- 
ber called the asteroids circling between Mars and Jupiter, 
and occasionally a little pufl^ of more or less luminous vapour 
and dust would drift into the system from the almost limit- 
less emptiness beyond. Such a puff is what we call a comet. 
All the rest of the space about us and around us and for un- 
fathomable distances beyond is cold, lifeless, and void. The 
nearest fixed star to us, on this minute scale, be it remem- 
bered — ^the earth as a one-inch ball, and the moon a little pea — 
would be over 40,000 miles away. Most of the fixed stars we 
see would still be scores and hundreds of millions of miles away. 
The science that tells of these things and how men have 
come to know about them is Astronomy, and to books of 
astronomy the reader must go to learn more about the sun and 



THE EARTH IN SPACE AND TIME s 

stars. The science and description of the world on which we 
live are called respectively Geology and Geography. 

The diameter of our world is a little under 8,000 miles. Its 
surface is rough, the more projecting parts of the roughness 
are mountains, and in the hollows of its surface there is a 
film of water, the oceans and seas. This film of water is about 
five miles thick at its deepest part — that is to say, the deepest 
oceans have a depth of five miles. This is very little in com- 
parison with the bulk of the world. 

About this sphere is a thin covering of air, the atmosphere. 
As we ascend in a balloon or go up a mountain from the level 
of the sea-shore the air is continually less dense, until at last it 
becomes so thin that it cannot support life. At a height of 
twenty miles there is scarcely any air at all — not one hun- 
dredth part of the density of air at the surface of the sea. The 
highest point to which a bird can fly is about four miles up — 
the condor, it is said, can struggle up to that; but most small 
birds and insects which are carried up by aeroplanes or bal- 
loons drop oif insensible at a much lower level, and the greatest 
height to which any mountaineer has ever climbed is under 
five miles. Men have flown in aeroplanes to a height of over 
four miles, and balloons with men in them have reached very 
nearly seven miles, but at the cost of considerable physical 
suffering. Small experimental balloons, containing not men, 
but recording instruments, have gone as high as twenty-two 
miles. 

It is in the upper few hundred feet of the crust of the earth, 
in the sea, and in the lower levels of the air below four miles 
that life is found. We do not know of any life at all except in 
these films of air and water upon our planet. So far as we 
know, all the rest of space is as yet without life. Scientific 
men have discussed the possibility of life, or of some process 
of a similar kind, occurring upon such kindred bodies as the 
planets Venus and Mars. But they point merely to question- 
able possibilities. 

Astronomers and geologists and those who study physics 
have been able to tell us something of the origin and history 
of the earth. They consider that, vast ages ago, the sun was a 
spinning, flaring mass of matter, not yet concentrated into a 
compast centre of heat and light, considerably larger than it is 
now, and spinning very much faster, and that as it whirled, 



4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

a series of fragments detached themselves from it, which be- 
came the planets. Our earth is one of these planets. The 
flaring mass that was the material of the earth broke into two 
masses as it spun ; a larger, the earth itself, and a smaller, 
which is now the dead, still moon. Astronomers give us con- 
vincing reasons for supposing that sun and earth and moon 
and all that system were then whirling about at a speed much 
greater than the speed at which they are moving to-day, and 
that at first our earth was a flaming thing upon which no 
life could live. The way in which they have reached these 
conclusions is by a very beautiful and interesting series of 
observations and reasoning, too long and elaborate for us to 
deal with here. But they oblige us to believe that the sun, 
incandescent though it is, is now much cooler than it was, 
and that it spins more slowly now than it- did, and that it 
continues to cool and slow down. And they also show that 
the rate at which the earth spins is diminishing and con- 
tinues to diminish — that is to say, that our day is growing 
longer and longer, and that the heat at the centre of the earth 
wastes slowly. There was a time when the day was not a half 
and not a third of what it is to-day; when a blazing hot sun, 
much gi^eater than it is now, must have moved visibly — had 
there been an eye to mark it — from its rise to its setting 
across the skies. There will be a time when the day will be 
as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun, shorn of its beams, 
will hang motionless in the heavens. 

It must have been in days of a much hotter sun, a far 
swifter day and night, high tides, great heat, tremendous 
storms and earthquakes, that life, of which we are a part, began 
upon the world. The moon also was nearer and brighter in 
those days and had a changing face. 



II 

THE RECOKD OF THE ROCKS 

1. The First Living Things. § 2. How Old Is the World? 



WE do not know how life began upon the earth.* 
Biologists, that is to say, students of life, have 
made guesses about these beginnings, but we will 
not discuss them here. Let us only note that they all agi'ee 
that life began where the tides of those swift days spread and 
receded over the steaming beaches of mud and sand. 

The atmosphere was much denser then, usually great cloud 
masses obscured the sun, frequent storms darkened the heavens. 
The land of those days, upheaved by violent volcanic forces, 
was a .barren land, without vegetation, without soil. The 
almost incessant rain-storms swept down upon it, and rivers 
and torrents carried great loads of sediment out to sea, to 
become muds that hardened later into slates and shales, and 
sands that became sandstones. The geologists have studied 
the whole accumulation of these sediments as it remains to- 
day, from those of the earliest ages to the most recent. Of 
course the oldest deposits are the most distorted and changed 
and worn, and in them there is now no certain trace to be 
found of life at all. Probably the earliest forms of life were 
small and soft, leaving no evidence of their existence behind 

^ Here in this history of life we are doing our best to give only known 
and established facts in the broadest way, and to reduce to a minimum 
the speculative element that must necessarily enter into our account. The 
reader who is curious upon this question of life's beginning will find a very 
good summary of current suggestions done by Professor L. L. Woodruff 
in President Lull's excellent compilation The Evolution of the Earth (Yale 
University Press). Professor H. F. Osborn's Origin and Evolution of Life 
is also a very vigorous and suggestive book upon this subject, but it de- 
mands a fair knowledge of physics and chemistry. Two very stimulating 
essays for the s\tudent are A. H. Church's Botanical Memoirs. No. 183, 
Ox. Univ. Press. 

5 



6 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

them. It was only when some of these living things developed 
skeletons and shells of lime and such-like hard material that 
they left fossil vestiges after they died, and so put themselves 
on record for examination. 

The literature of geology is very largely an account of the 
fossils that are found in the rocks, and of the order in which 
layers after layers of rocks lie one on another. The very 
oldest rocks must have been formed before there was any sea 
at all, when the earth was too hot for a sea to exist, and when 
the water that is now sea was an atmosphere of steam mixed with 
the air. Its higher levels were dense with clouds, from which 
a hot rain fell towards the rocks below, to be converted again 
into steam long before it reached their incandescence. Be- 
low this steam atmosphere the molten world-stuff solidified as 
the first rocks. These first rocks must have solidified as a 
cake over glowing liquid material beneath, much as cooling 
lava does. They must have appeared first aa /brusts and 
/clinkers. They must have been constantly remelted and re- 
crystallized before any thickness of them became pennanently 
solid. The name of Fundamental Gneiss is given to a great 
underlying system of crystalline rocks which probably formed 
age by age as this hot youth of the world drew to its close. 
The scenery of the world in the days when the Fundamental 
Gneiss was formed must have been more like the interior of a 
furnace than anything else to be found upon earth at the pres- 
ent time. 

After long ages the steam in the atmosphere began also to 
condense and fall right down to earth, pouring at last over 
these warm primordial rocks in rivulets of hot water and 
gathering in depressions as pools and lakes and the first seas. 
Into those seas the streams that poured over the rocks brought 
with them dust and particles to form a sediment, and this sedi- 
ment accumulated in layers, or as geologists call them, strata, 
and formed the first Sedimentary Rocks. Those earliest sedi- 
mentary rocks sank into depressions and were covered by 
others; they were bent, tilted up, and torn by great volcanic 
disturbances and by tidal strains that swept through the rocky 
crust of the earth. We find these first sedimentary rocks still 
coming to the surface of the land here and there, either not 
covered by later strata or exposed after vast ages of conceal- 
ment by the wearing off of the rock that covered them later — 



THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS 7 

there are great surfaces of them in Canada especially; they 
are cleft and bent, partially remelted, recrystallized, hardened 
and compressed, but recog-nizable for what they are. And 
they contain no single certain trace of life at all. They are 
frequently called Azoic (lifeless) Kocks. But since in some 
of these earliest sedimentary rocks a substance called graphite 
(black lead) occurs, and also red and black oxide of iron, and 
since it is asserted that these substances need the activity of 
living things for their production, which may or may not be 
the case, some geologists prefer to call these earliest sedi- 
mentary rocks Archceozoic (primordial life). They suppose 
that the first life was soft living matter that had no shells or 
skeletons or any such structure that could remain as a recog- 
nizable fossil after its death, and that its chemical influence 
caused the deposition of graphite and iron oxide. This is pure 
guessing, of course, and there is at least an equal probability 
that in the time of formation of the Azoic Rocks, life had 
not yet begun. 

Overlying or overlapping these Azoic or Archseozoic rocks 
come others, manifestly also very ancient and worn, which do 
contain traces of life. These first remains are of the simplest 
description ; they are the vestiges of simple plants called algae, 
or marks like the tracks made by worms in the sea mud. There 
are also the skeletons of the microscopic creatures called Radio- 
laria. This second series of rocks is called the Proterozoic (be- 
ginning of life) series, and marks a long age in the world's 
history. Lying over and above the Proterozoic rocks is a third 
series, which is found to contain a considerable number and 
variety of traces of living things. First comes the evidence 
of a diversity of shellfish, crabs, and such-like crawling 
things, worms, seaweeds, and the like ; then of a multitude of 
fishes and of the beginnings of land plants and land creatures. 
These rocks are called the Palaeozoic (ancient life) rocks. 
They mark a vast era, during which life was slowly spreading, 
increasing, and developing in the seas of our world. Through 
long ages, through the earliest Palseozoic time, it was no more 
than a proliferation of such swimming and creeping things 
in the water. There were creatures called trilobites; they were 
crawling things like big sea woodlice that were probably re- 
lated to the American king-crab of to-day. There were also 
sea scorpions, the prefects of that early world. The individuals 



8 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of certain species of these were nine feet long. These were 
the very highest sorts of life. There were abundant different 
sorts of an order of shellfish called brachiopods. There were 
plant animals, rooted and joined together like plants, and loose 
weeds that waved in the waters, 

. It was not a display of life to excite our imaginations. There 
was nothing that ran or flew or even swam swiftly or skilfully. 
Except for the size of some of the creatures, it was not very 
different from, and rather less various than, the kind of lif^ 
a student would gather from any summer-time ditch nowadays 
for microscopic examination. Such was the life of the shallow 
seas through a hundred million years or more in the early 
Palaeozoic period. The land during that time was apparently 
absolutely barren. We find no trace nor hint of land life. 
Everything that lived in those days lived under water for most 
or all of its life. 

Between the formation of these Lower Palaeozoic rocks in 
which the sea scorpion and trilobite ruled, and our owti time, 
there have intervened almost immeasurable ages, represented 
by layers and masses of sedimentary rocks. There are first 
the Upper Palaeozoic rocks, and above these the geologists dis- 
tinguish two great divisions. Next above the Palaeozoic come 
the Mesozoic (middle life) rocks, a second vast system of fossil- 
bearing rocks, representing perhaps a hundred millions of 
swift years, and containing a wonderful array of fossil re- 
mains, bones of giant reptiles and the like, which we will pres- 
ently describe ; and above these again are the Cainozoic (recent 
life) rocks, a third great volume in the history of life, an un- 
finished volume of which the sand and mud that was carried 
out to sea yesterday by the rivers of the world, to bury the bones 
and scales and bodies and tracks that will become at last fossils of 
the things of to-day, constitute the last written leaf. 

These markings and fossils in the rocks and the rocks them- 
selves are our first historical documents. The history of life 
that men have puzzled out and are still puzzling out from them 
is called the Eecord of the Rocks. By studying this record 
men are slowly piecing together a stoi-y of life's beginnings, 
and of the beginnings of our kind, of which our ancestors a 
century or so ago had no suspicion. But when we call these 
rocks and the fossils a record and a history, it must not be 
supposed that there is any sign of an orderly keeping of a 



THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS 




10 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

record. It is merely that whatever happens leaves some trace, 
if only we are intelligent enough to detect the meaning of that 
trace. Wor are the rocks of the world in orderly layers one 
above the other, convenient for men to read. They are not 
like the books and pages of a library. They are torn, dis- 
rupted, interrupted, flung about, defaced, like a carelessly ar- 
ranged office after it has experienced in succession a bombard- 
ment, a hostile military occupation, looting, an earthquake, 
riots, and a fire. And so it is that for countless generations 
this Eecord of the Rocks lay unsuspected beneath the feet 
of men. Fossils were known to the Ionian Greeks in the sixth 
century e.g., they were discussed at Alexandria by Eratos- 
thenes and others in the third century B.C., a discussion which 
is summarised in Strabo's Geography ( ?20-10 b.c). They 
were known to the Latin poet Ovid, but he did not understand 
their nature. He thought they were the first rude efforts of 
creative power. They were noted by Arabic writers in the 
tenth century. Leonardo da Vinci, who lived so recently as 
the opening of the sixteenth century (1452-1519), was one 
of the first Europeans to grasp the real significance of fossils, 
and it has been only within the last century and a half that 
man has begun the serious and sustained deciphering of these 
long-neglected early pages of his world's history. 

§ 2. 

Speculations about geological time vary enormously. Esti- 
mates of the age of the oldest rocks by geologists and 
astronomers starting from different standpoints have varied 
between 1,600,000,000, and 25,000,000. That the period of 
time has been vast, that it is to be counted by scores and pos- 
sibly by hundreds of millions of years, is the utmost that can 
be said with certainty in the matter. It is quite open to the 
reader to divide every number in the appended time diagram 
by ten or multiply it by two; no one can gainsay him. Of 
the relative amount of time as between one age and anothei* 
we have, however, stronger evidence ; if the reader cuts down 
the 800,000,000 we have given here to 400,000,000, then he 
must reduce the 40,000,000 of the Cainozoic to 20,000,000. 
And be it noted that whatever the total sum may be, most 
geologists are in agreement that half or mare than half of the 



THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS 



11 



whole of geological time had passed before life had developed 
to the Later Palwozoic level. The reader reading quickly 
through these opening chapters may be apt to think of them 







^/eo 



^t%6 



^S/26 " 



t94 " 



> Azoic; Of Arcl 

PossiMv -WTihoixt K& 



Wtthout visihlc traces oP h-vtti^ stmct' 
wrc. jias. oP7iTuzru2L:xdxxe.,Jclfy-&lvy~' 
Green. Scuxvt cuxcL iiia. like. 



'Eaxr\jy Palaeozoic 

■ Sefhra ika appearaxica. oPaxw verbshrcdbi. 
axuzncds -^^"^ ofSza. Scorpiaas 6* Trilabvbzs. 

'Acre, of Wishes, 'UmphHria. , azid. Swatnp 
forests. 



I 'Mcsozcic 

I T^qa op ^Reptiles. 

}C^UXXOZOXC ^^12 op Mam mals , (jvnss, & 
Land. 'Tamsts. 



as a mere swift prehule of preparation to the apparently much 
longer history that follows, but in reality that subsequent his- 
tory is longer only because it is more detailed and more in- 
teresting to us. It looms larger in perspective. For ages, 
that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot and lifeless, 



12 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above the 
level of the animalculse in a drop of ditch-water. 

Not only is Space from the point of view of life and human- 
ity empty, but Time i& empty also. Life is like a little glow, 
scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities. 



Ill 

NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES 
OE SPECIES 

NOW here it will be well to put plainly certain general 
facts about this new thing, life, that was creeping in 
the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early 
Palaeozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet 
alone in all the immensity of space. 

Life differs from all things whatever that are without life 
in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful dif- 
ferences among living things to-day, but all living things past 
and present agree in jwssessing a certain yower of growth, all 
living things take nourishment, all living' things move about 
as they feed and grow, though the movement be no more 
than the spread of roots through the soil, or of branches in the 
air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they give rise to 
other living things, either by gTOwing and then dividing or 
by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing 
young. Reproduction is a characteristic of life. 

No living thing goes on living for ever. There seems to 
be a limit of growth for every kind of living thing. Among 
very small and simple living things, such as that microscopic 
blob of living matter the Amoeha, an individual may grow and 
then divide completely into two new individuals, which again 
may divide in their turn. Many other microscopic creatures 
live actively for a time, grow, and then become quiet and 
inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break 
up wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which 
are released and scattered and again gi-ow into the likeness 
of their parent. Among more complex creatures the reproduc- 
tion is not usually such simple division, though division does 
occur even in the case of many creatures big enough to be 
visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost all 

13 



14 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

larger beings is that the individual gi'ows up to a certain limit 
of size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines 
and stops. As it reaches its full size it matures, it begins to 
produce young, which are either born alive or hatched from 
eggs. But all of its body does not produce young. Only a 
special part does that. After the individual has lived and 
produced offspring for some time, it ages and dies. It does 
so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to its 
life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants 
as they are of animals. And they are not true of things that 
do not live. Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but 
they have no set limits of gi-owth or size, they do not move of 
their own accord and there is no stir within theniA. Crystals 
once formed may last unchanged for millions of years. There 
is no rep'oduction for any non-living thing. 

This growth and dying and repi'oduction of living things 
leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which 
a living thing produces are either directly, or after some inter- 
mediate stages and changes (such as the changes of a cater- 
pillar and butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they 
are never exactly like it or like each other. There is always 
a slight diiference, which we speak of as individualitij. A 
thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thou- 
sand next year; these latter will look to us almost exactly 
like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight 
difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butter- 
flies because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy 
for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world 
now are descended from the men and women of a.d. 1800, but 
■not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished 
generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is time 
of every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every 
species changes all its individualities in each generation. That 
is true of all the minute creatures that swarmed and repro- 
duced and died in the Archseozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it is 
of men to-day. 

Every species of living things is continually dying and 
being born again, as a multitude of fresh individuals. 

Consider, then, .what must happen to a new-born generation 
of living things of any species. Some of the individuals will 
be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in 



NATURAL SELECTION 15 

some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or 
less suited. In particular single cases any sort of luck or 
accident may occur, but on the luhole the better equipped in- 
dividuals will live and gi'ow up and reproduce themselves and 
the weaker will as a imle go under. The latter will be less able 
to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that 
in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a 
species, a picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and 
a preference for the strong and suitable. This process is called 
Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest} 

It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow 
and breed and die, that every species, so long as the conditions 
under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more 
perfectly fitted to those conditions in every generation. 

But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of 
individual that used to succeed may/now fa,il to succeed and a 
sort of individual that could not det on at all under the old 
conditions may now find its oppo/-tunity. These species will 
change, therefore, generation by /generation ; the old sort of 
individual that used to prosper aiid dominate will fail and die 
out and the new sort of individual will become the rule, — 
until the general character of the species changes. 

Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey- 
brown animal living in a bitterly cold land which is usually 
under snow. Such individuals as have the thickest, whitest 
fur will be least hurt by the cold, less seen by their enemies, 
and less conspicuous as they seek their pi"ey. The fur of this 
species will thicken and its whiteness increase with every gen- 
eration, until there is no advantage in carrying any more fur. 

Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into 
the land, sweeps away the snows, makes white creatures glar- 
ingly visible during the greater part of the year and thick 
fur an encumbrance. Then every individual with a touch of 
brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will find itself at 
an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a handi- 
cap. There will be a weeding out of the white in favour of 
the brown in each generation. If this change of climate 
come about too quickly, it may of course exterminate the 
species altogether; but if it come about gradually, the species, 
although it may have a hard time, may yet be able to change 

' It might be called with more exa(.tness the Survival of the Fitter, 



16 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




NATURAL SELECTION 17 

itself and adapt itself generation by generation. This cliange 
and adaptation is called the Modification of iSpecies. 

Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the 
lands inhabited by the species ; maybe it occurs only on one side 
of some gTeat arm of the sea or some great mountain range 
or such-like divide, and not on the other. A warm ocean cur- 
rent like the Gulf Stream may be deflected, and flow so as 
to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the other still cold. 
Then on the cold side this species will still be going on to its 
utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side 
it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat. 
At the same time there will probably be other changes going 
on ; a difference in the paws perhaps, because one half 
of the species will be frequently scratching through snow for 
its food, while the other will be scampering over brown earth. 
Probably also the difference of climate will mean differences in 
the sort of food available, and that may produce differences 
in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be 
changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the 
changes in the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs 
and all the internal chemistry of the body. And so through 
all the structure of the creature. A time will come when 
the two separated varieties of this formerly single species will 
become so unlike each other as to be recognizably different 
species. Such a splitting up of a species in the course of gen- 
erations into two or more species is called the Differentiation 
of Species. 

And it should be clear to the reader that given these ele- 
mental facts of life, given growth and death and reproduction 
with individual variation in a world that changes, life must 
change in this way, modification and differentiation muist 
occur, old species must disappear, and new ones appear. We 
have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of animal, 
but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of 
all life, and equally true of the soft jellies and simple be^ 
ginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of 
years between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters 
of the Proterozoic seas. 

The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun 
rose and set in only a quarter of the time it now takes, when 
the warm seas poured in great tides over the sandy and 



18 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

muddy shores of the rocky lands and the air was full of 
clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and 
species must have developed at a gi-eat pace. Life was prob- 
ably as swift and short as the days and years; the generations, 
which natural selection picked over, followed one another in 
rapid succession. 

Natural selection is a slower process with man than with 
any other creature. It takes twenty years or more before an 
ordinary human being in western Europe grows up and re- 
produces. In the case of most animals the new generation 
is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and lowly be- 
ings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, gi-owth 
and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours 
or even of a few brief minutes. Modification and differentia- 
tion of species must accordingly have been extremely rapid, 
and life had already developed a great variety of widely con- 
trasted forms before it began to leave traces in the rocks. 
The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore, with any 
group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and 
existing creatures are descended. It begins in the midst of 
the game, with nearly every main division of the animal 
kingdom already represented. Plants are already plants, and 
animals animals. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea 
that has already begun, and has been going on for some time. 
The brachiopods are discovered already in their shells, accept- 
ing and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters 
and mussels do now; the gi-eat water scorpions crawl among 
the seaweeds, the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and 
scuttle away. In that ancient mud and among those early 
weeds there was probably as rich and abundant and active 
a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditch- 
water to-day. In the ocean waters, too, down to the utmost 
downward limit to which light could filter, then as now, there 
was an abundance of minute and translucent, and in many 
cases phosphorescent, beings. 

But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed 
with life, the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as 
we can guess, a stony wilderness without a trace of life. 



IV 

THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE 

§ 1. Life and Vv'ater. § 2. The Earliest Animals. 

§ 1 

WHEREVER the shore line ran there was life, and 
that life went on in and by and with water as its 
home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity. 

The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished 
whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and 
perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing 
for life in those days, against which at first it had no protec- 
tion. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tides, 
any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep 
its moisture during hours of low tide or drought met with 
every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There 
must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the 
other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches 
in the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved of course 
in the water) and light. 

No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, 
without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living 
things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The 
air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture 
in our lungs ; and all our food must be liquefied before it 
can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which are always 
under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they 
breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But 
a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water 
must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from 
drying up. Before the seaweeds could creep up out of the 
Early Palteozoic seas into the intertidal line of the beach, they 
had to develop a tougher outer skin to hold their moisture. 

19 



20 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Before the ancestor of the sea scorpion could survive being 
left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour. The 
trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled 
up into balls, far less as a protection against each other and 
any other enemies they may have possessed, than as a precau- 
tion against drying. . And when presently, as we ascend the 
Palaeozoic rocks, the fish appear, first of all the back-boned 
or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a number of them 
are already adapted by the protection of their gills with gill 
covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming-bladder, to 
face the same risk of temporary stranding. 

Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves 
to intertidal conditions were also bringing themselves into a 
region of brighter light, and light is very necessary and 
precious to all plants. Any development of structure that 
would stifi^en them and hold them up to the light, so that in- 
stead of crumping and flopping when the waters receded, they 
would stand up outsp^-ead, was a great advantage. And so 
we find them developing fibre and support, and the beginning 
of woody fibre in them. The early plants reproduced by soft 
spores, or half-animal "gametes," that were released in water, 
were distributed by water and could only germinate under 
water. The early plants were tied, and most lowly plants to- 
day are tied, by the conditions of their life cycle, to water. 
But here again there was a great advantage to be got by the 
development of some protection of the spores from drought 
that would enable reproduction to occur without submergence. 
So soon as a species could do that, it could live and reproduce 
and spread above the high-water mark, bathed in light and 
out of r-each of the beating and distress of the waves. The 
main classificatory divisions of the larger plants mark stages 
in the release of plant life from the necessity of submergence 
by the development of woody support and of a method of 
reproduction that is more and more defiant of drying up. The 
lower plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The 
lower mosses must live in damp, and even the development of 
the spore of the ferns demands at certain stages extreme wet- 
ness. The highest plants have carried freedom from water 
so far that they can live and reproduce if only there is some 
moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their 
problem of living out of water altogether. 



THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND 21 

The essentials of that problem were worked out through 
the vast seons of the Proterozoic Age and the early Palaeozoic 
Age by nature's method of experiment and trial. Then slowly, 
but in great abundance, a variety of new plants began to 
swarm away frcim the sea and over the lower lands, still keep- 
ing to swamp and lagoon and water-course as they spread. 

§ 2 

And after the plants came the animal life. 

There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is 
no sort of land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of 
a water-inhabiting being which has been adapted through 
the modification and differentiation of species to life out of the 
water. This adaptation is attained in various ways. In the 
case of the land scorpion the gill-plates of the primitive sea 
scorpion are sunken into the body so as to make the lung- 
books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of crustaceans, 
such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected 
by the gill-cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The 
ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches 
and air tubes, the tracheal tubes, which carry the air all over 
the body before it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated 
land animals, the gills of the ancestral fish were first supple- 
mented and then replaced by a bag-like growth from the throat, 
the primitive lung swimming-bladder. To this day there sur- 
vive certain mudfish which enable us to understand very clearly 
the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked 
their way out of the water. These creatures {e.g. the African 
lung fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a 
rainy full season and a dry season, during which the rivers 
become mere ditches of baked mud. During the rainy season 
these fish swim about and breathe by gills like any other fish. 
As the waters of the river evaporate, these fish bury them- 
selves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the creature 
keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing air, 
which passes into its swimming-bladder. The Australian lung 
fish, when it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant 
pools, and the water has become deaerated and foul, rises to 
the surface and giilps air. A newt in a pond does exactly 
the same thing. These creatures still remain at the transition 



22 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




hreaiiung 



stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the higher vertehrated 
animals were released from their restriction to an under-water 
life. 

The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their 
life history all the stages in the process of this liberation. 
They are still dependent on water for their reproduction ; their 
eggs must be laid in sunlit water, and there they must develop. 
The young tadpole has branching external gills that wave in 

the water; then a 
gill cover gi-ows 
back over them and 
fonns a gill cham- 
ber. Then as the 
creature's legs ap- 
pear and its tail is 
absorbed, it begins 
to use its lungs, and 
its gills dwindle 
and vanish. The 
adult frog can live all the rest of its days in the air, but 
it can be drowned if it is kept steadfastly below water. When 
we come to the reptile, however, we find an egg which is pro- 
tected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg 
produces young which breathe by lungs from the very moment 
of hatching. The reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant 
in its freedom from the necessity to pass any stage of its life 
cycle in water. 

The later Palaeozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give 
us the materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading 
of life over the land. Geographically, all round the northern 
half of the world it was an age of lagoons and shallow seas 
very favourable to this invasion. The new plants, now that 
they had acquired the power to live this new aerial life, de- 
veloped with an extraordinary richness and variety. 

There were as yet no true flowering plants,^ no grasses nor 
trees that shed their leaves in winter ; ^ the first ''flora" con- 
sisted of great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns, 
and kindred vegetation. Many of these plants took the form 
of huge-stemmed trees, of which great multitudes of trunks 
survive fossilized to this day. Some of these trees were over 

* Phanerogams. * Deciduous trees. 



THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND 



23 



a hundred feet liigli, of orders and classes now vanished from 
the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in which 
no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green 



5cntie "Reptiles c/*f^ 




slime and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind 
them. The abundant remains of these first swamp forests 
constitute the main coal measures of the world to-day. 

Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled and 
glided and flew the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four- 
winged creatures, often very big, some of them having wings 



24 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

measuring a foot in length. There were numerous dragon flies 
— one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a wing span 
of twenty-nine inches ! There were also a great variety of 
flying cockroaches. Scorpions abounded, and a number of 
early spiders, which, however, had no spinnerets for web miak- 
ing. Land snails appeared. So, too, did the first-known step 
of our own ancestry upon land, the amphibia. As we ascend 
the higher levels of the Later Palaeozoic record, we find the 
process of air adaptation has gone as far as the appearance of 
true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia. 

The land life of the tipper Palaeozoic Age was the life of 
a gi'een swamp forest without flowers or birds or the noises 
of modern insects. There were no big land beasts at all ; wal- 
lowing amphibia and primitive reptiles were the very highest 
creatures that life had so far produced. Whatever land Lay 
away from the water or high above the water was still alto- 
gether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by 
generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water 
of its beginning. 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 

1. The Age of Lowland Life. § 2, Flying Dragons. 
§ 3. 27/ e First Birds. § 4. An age of Hardship and 
Death. § 5. The first appearance of Fur arid Feathers. 



WE know that for hundreds of thousands of years the 
wetness and warnath, the shallow lagoon conditions 
that made possible the vast accumulations of vegetable 
matter which, compressed and nnimmitied,^ are now coal, pre- 
vailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals, 
it is true ; but they did not last long enough to destroy the 
growths. Then that long age of luxuriant low-grade vegetation 
drew to its end, and for a time life on the earth seems to have 
undergone a period of world-wide bleakness. 

We cannot discuss fully here the changes that have gone 
on and are going on in the climate of the earth. A great variety 
of causes, astronomical movements, changes in the sun and 
changes upon and within the earth, combine to produce a cease- 
less fluctuation of the conditions imder which life exists. As 
these conditions change, life, too, must change or perish. 

When the story resumes again after this arrest at the end 
of the Palaeozoic period we find life entering upon a fresh 
phase of richness and expansion. Vegetation has made great 
advances in the art of living out of water. While the Palaeozoic 
plants of the coal measures probably grew with swamp water 
flowing over their roots, the Mesozoic flora from its very out- 
set included palm-like cycads and low-grown conifers that were 
distinctly land plants growing on soil above the water level. 

^Dr. Marie Stopes, Monograph on the Constitution of Coal. 
25 



26 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The lower levels of the Mesozoic land were no doubt covered 
by great fern brakes and shnibby bush and a kind of jungle 
growth of trees. But there existed as yet no grass, no small 
flowering plants, no turf nor greensward. Probably the Mes- 
ozoic was not an age of very brightly coloured vegetation. It 
must have had a flora green in the wet season and brown and 
purple in the dry. There were no gay flowers, no bright autumn 
tints before the fall of the leaf, because there was as yet no 
fall of the leaf. And beyond the lower levels the world was 
still barren, still unclothed, still exposed without any mitigation 
to the wear and tear of the wind and rain. 

When one speaks of conifers in the Mesozoic the reader 
must not think of the pines and firs that clothe the high moun- 
tain slopes of our time. He must think of low-growing ever- 
greens. The mountains were still as bare and lifeless as ever. 
The only colour effects among the mountains were the colour 
effects of naked rock, such colours as make the landscape of 
Colorado so marvellous to-day. 

Amidst this spreading vegetation of the lower plains the 
reptiles were increasing mightily in multitude and variety. 
They were now in many cases absolutely land animals. There 
are numerous anatomical points of distinction between a reptile 
and an amphibian; they held good between such reptiles and 
amphibians as prevailed in the carboniferous time of the Upper 
Paleozoic ; but the fundamental difference between reptiles 
and amphibia which matters in this history is that the am- 
phibian must go back to the water to lay its eggs, and that in 
the early stages of its life it must live in and under water. 
The reptile, on the other hand, has cut out all the tadpole stages 
from its life cycle, or, to be more exact, its tadpole stages are 
got through before the young leave the egg case. The reptile 
has come out of the water altogether. Some had gone back to 
it again, just as the hippopotamus and the otter among mam- 
mals have gone back, but that is a further extension of the 
story to which we cannot give much attention in this Outline. 

In the Palaeozoic period, as we have said, life had not spread 
beyond the swampy river valleys and the borders of sea lagoons 
and the like; but in the Mesozoic, life was growing ever more 
accustomed to the thinner medium of the air, was sweeping 
boldly up over the plains and towards the hill-sides. It is well 
for the student of human history and the human future to 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 



27 







28 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

note that. If a disembodied intelligence with no knowledge 
of the future had come to earth and studied life during the early 
Palaeozoic age, he might very reasonably have concluded that 
life was absolutely contined to the water, and that it could never 
spread over the land. It found a way. In the Later Palae- 
ozoic Period that visitant might have been equally sure that 
life could not go beyond the edge of a swamp. The Mesozoic 
Period would still have found him setting bounds to life far 
more limited than the bounds that are set to-day. And so 
to-day, though we mark how life and man are still limited to 
five miles of air and a depth of perhaps a mile or so of sea, 
we must not conclude from that present limitation that life, 
through man, may not presently spread out and up and down 
to a range of living as yet inconceivable. 

The earliest known reptiles were beasts with great bellies 
and not very powerful legs, very like their kindred amphibia, 
wallowing as the crocodile wallows to this day; but in the 
IVIesozoic they soon began to stand up and go stoutly on all 
fours, and several great sections of them began to balance them- 
selves on tail and hind-legs, rather as the kangaroos do now, 
in order to release the fore limbs for .gi-asping food. The bones 
of one notable division of reptiles which retained a quadrupedal 
habit, a division of which many remains have been found in 
South African and Russian Early Mesozoic deposits, display 
a number of characters which approach those of the mammalian 
skeleton, and because of this resemblance to the mammals 
(beasts) this division is called the Theriomorpha (beastlike). 
Another division was the crocodile branch, and another devel- 
oped towards the tortoises and turtles. The Plesiosaurs and 
Ichthyosaurs were two groups which have left no living repre- 
sentatives; they were huge reptiles returning to a whale-like 
life in the sea. Pliosaurus, one of the largest plesiosaurs, 
measured thirty feet from snout to tail tip — of which half was 
neck. The Mosasaurs were a third group of great porpoise-like 
marine lizards. But the largest and most diversified group of 
these Mesozoic reptiles was the gi"Oup we have spoken of as 
kangaroo-like, the Dinosaurs, many of which attained enor- 
mous proportions. In bigness these greater Dinosdurs have 
never been exceeded, although the sea can still show in the 
whales creatures as great. Some of these, and the largest 
among them, were herbivorous animals ; they browsed on the 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 29 

rushy vegetatiou and among the ferns and bushes, or they stood 
up and grasped trees with their fore-legs while they devoured 
the foliage. Among the browsers, for example, were the 
Diplodocus carnegii, which measured eighty-four feet in length, 
and the Atlantosaurus. The Gigantosaurus, disinterred by a 
German expedition in 1912 from rocks in East Africa, was 
still more colossal. It measured well over a hundred feet! 
These gi-eater monsters had legs, and they are usually figured 
as standing up on them ; but it is vei-y doubtful if they could 
have supported their weight in this way, out of water. Buoyed 
up by water or mud, they may have got along. Another note- 
wortlay type we have figured is the Tnceratops. There were 
also a number of great flesh-eaters who preyed upon these 
herbivores. Of these, Tyrannosaurus seems almost the last 
word in "fright fulness" among living things. Some species of 
this genus measured forty feet from snout to tail. Appar- 
ently it carried this vast body kangaroo fashion on its tail and 
hindlegs. Probably it reared itself up. Some authorities 
even suppose that it leapt through the air. If so, it pos- 
sessed muscles of a quite miraculous quality. A leaping 
elephant would be a far less astounding idea. Much more 
probably it waded half submerged in pursuit of the herbivorous 
river saurians. 



One special development of the dinosaurian type of reptile 
was a light, hopping, climbing group of creatures which de- 
veloped a bat-like web between the fifth finger and the side 
of the body, which was used in gliding from tree to tree after 
the fashion of the flying squirrels. These bat-lizards were the 
Pterodactyls. They are often described as flying reptiles, and 
pictures are drawn of Mesozoic scenery in which they are 
seen soaring and swooping about. But their breastbone has 
no keel such as the breastbone of a bird has for the attachment 
of muscles strong enough for long sustained flying. They 
must have flitted about like bats. They must have had a 
grotesque resemblance to heraldic dragons, and they played the 
part of bat-like birds in the Mesozoic jungles. But bird-like 
though they were, they were not birds nor the ancestors of 
birds. The structure of their wings was altogether different 
from that of birds. The structure of their wings was that of 



30 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



a hand with one long finger and a web; the wing of a bird 
is like an arm with feathers projecting from its hind edge. 
And these Pterodactyls had no feathers. 




Far less prevalent at this time were certain other truly bird- 
like creatures, of which the earlier sorts also hopped and 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 



31 



clambered and the later sorts skimmed and flew. These were 
at first — by all the standards of classification — Reptiles. They 
developed into true birds as they developed wings and as their 



^fen?iai^2^ 




reptilian scales became long and complicated, fronds rather 
than scales, and so at last, by much spreading and splitting, 
feathers. Feathers a"re the distinctive covering of birds, and 
they give a power of resisting heat and cold far greater than 



32 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

that of any other integumentary covering except perhaps the 
thickest fur. At a very early stage this novel covering of 
feathers, this new heat-proof contrivance that life had chanced 
upon, enabled many species of birds to invade a province for 
which the pterodactyl was ill equipped. They took to sea fish- 
ing — if indeed they did not begin with it^and spread to the 
north and south polewards beyond the temperature limits set 
to the true reptiles. The earliest birds seem to have been car- 
nivorous divers and water birds. To this day some of the 
most primitive bird forms are found among the sea birds of 
the Arctic and Antarctic seas, and it is among these sea birds 
that zoologists still find lingering traces of teeth, which have 
otherwise vanished completely from the beak of the bird. 
The earliest known bird (the Archceopieryx) had no 
it had a row of teeth in a jaw like a reptile's. It liad three 
claws at the forward comer of its wing. Its tail, too, was pe- 
culiar. All modern birds hav£ their tail feathers set in ' a 
short compact bony rump; the Archccopieryx had a long bony 
tail with a row of feathers along each side. 



This great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of 
the book of life, is indeed an amazing story of reptilian life 
proliferating and developing. But the most striking thing of 
all the story remains to be told. Right up to the latest Meso- 
zoic Rocks we find all these reptilian orders we have enumerated 
still flourishing unchallenged. There is no hint of an enemy 
or competitor to them in the relics we find of their world. 
Then the record is broken. We do not know how long a time 
the break represents; many pages may be missing here, pagies 
that may represent some gTeat cataclysmal climatic change. 
When next we find abundant traces of the land plants and the 
land animals of the earth, this great multitude of reptile species 
had gone. For the most part they have left no descendants. 
They have been "wiped out." The pterodactyls have gone ab- 
solutely, of the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs none is alive ; the 
mosasaurs have gone; of the lizards a few remain, the moni- 
tors of the Dutch East Indies are the largest ; all the multitude 
and diversity of the dinosaurs have vanished. Only the croco- 
diles and the turtles and tortoises carry on in any quantity into 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 33 

Cainozoic times. The place of all these types in tlie picture that 
the Cainozoic fossils presently unfold to us is taken by other 
animals not closely related to the Mesozoic reptiles and cer- 
tainly not descended from any of their ruling types. A new 
kind of life is in possession of the world. 

This apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond 
all question, the most striking revolution in the whole history 
of the earth before the coming of mankind. It is probably 
connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm 
conditions and the onset of a new austerer age, in which the 
winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot. The 
Mesozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adapted to warm 
conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new 
life, on the other hand, was before all things capable of re- 
sisting great changes of temperature. 

Whatever it was that led to the extinction of the Mesozoic 
reptiles, it was probably some very far-reaching change indeed, 
for the life of the seas did at the same time undergo a similar 
catastrophic alteration. The crescendo and ending of the 
Reptiles on land was paralleled by the crescendo and ending 
of the Ammonites, a division of creatures like squids with coiled 
shells which swarmed in those ancient seas. All though the 
rocky record of this Mesozoic period there is a vast multitude 
and variety of these coiled shells ; there are hundreds of species, 
and towards the end of the Mesozoic period they increased in 
diversity and produced exaggerated types. When the record 
resumes these, too, have gone. So far as the reptiles are con- 
cerned, people may perhaps be inclined to argue that they were 
exterminated because the Mammals that replaced them, com- 
peted with them, and were more fitted to survive; but nothing 
of the sort can be true of the Ammonites, because to this day 
their place has not been taken. Simply they are gone. Un- 
known conditions made it possible for them to live in the 
Mesozoic seas, and then some unknown change made life im- 
possible for them. No genus of Ammonite sui-vives to-day 
of all that vast variety, but there still exists one isolated genus 
very closely related to the Ammonites, the Pearly Nautilus. It 
is found, it is to be noted, in the warm waters of the Indian 
and Pacific oceans. 

And as for the Mammals competing with and ousting the 
less fit reptiles, a struggle of which people talk at times, there 



34 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

is not a scrap of evidence of any such direct competition. To 
judge by the Record of the Rocks as we know it to-day, there 
is much more reason for believing that first the reptiles in 
some inexplicable way perished, and then that later on, after a 
very hard time for all life upon the earth, the mammals, as 
conditions became more genial again, developed and spread 
to fill the vacant world. 



"Were there manmials in the Mesozoic period ? 

This is a question not yet to be answered precisely. Pa- 
tiently and steadily the geologists gather fresh evidence and 
reason out completer conclusions. At any time some new 
deposit may reveal fossils that will illuminate this question. 
Certainly either mammals, or the ancestors of the mammals, 
must have lived throughout the Mesozoic period. In the very 
opening chapter of the Mesozoic volume of the Record there 
were those Theriomorphous Reptiles to which we have already 
alluded, and in the later Mesozoic a number of small jaw- 
bones are found, entirely mammalian in character. But there 
is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that there lived any 
Mesozoic Mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face. 
The Mesozoic mammals or mammal-like reptiles — for we do not 
know clearly which they were — seem to have been all obscure 
little beasts of the size of mice and rats, more like a down- 
trodden order of reptiles than a distinct class ; probably they 
still laid eggs and were developing only slowly their distinctive 
covering of hair. They lived away from big w^aters, and per- 
haps in the desolate uplands, as marmots do now ; probably they 
lived there beyond the pursuit of the carnivorous dinosaurs. 
Some perhaps went on all fours, some chiefly went on their 
hind-legs and clambered with their fore limbs. They became 
fossils only so occasionally that chance has not yet revealed 
a single complete skeleton in the whole vast record of the 
Mesozoic rocks by which to check these guesses. 

These little Theriomorphs, these ancestral mammals, de- 
veloped hair. Hairs, like feathers, are long and elaborately 
specialized scales. Hair is perhaps the clue to the salvation 
of the early mammals. Leading lives upon the margin of ex- 
istence, away from the marshes and the warmth, they developed 



THE AGE OF REPTILES 



35 



an outer covering only second in its warmth-holding (or heat- 
resisting) powers to the down and feathers of the Arctic sea- 
birds. And so they held out through the age of hardship be- 



j^. 



cspcvcvms 

(^Rapbiiaxi wizudess waiar-hted) 




tween the Mesozoic and Cainozoic ages, to which most of the 
true reptiles succumbed. 

All the main characteristics of this flora and sea and land 
fauna that came to an end with the end of the Mesozoic age 
were such as were adapted to an equable climate and to shallow 



Se THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and swampy regions. But in the case of their Cainozoic suc- 
cessors, both hair and feathers gave a power of resistance to 
variable temperatures such as no reptile possessed, and with it 
they gave a range far greater than any animal had hitherto 
attained. 

The range of life of the Lower Palaeozoic Period was con- 
fined to warm water. 

The range of life of the Upper Palaeozoic Period was con- 
fined to warm water or to warm swamps and wet ground. 

The range of life of the Mesozoic Period as we know it 
was confined to water and fairly low-lying valley regions under 
equable conditions. 

Meanwhile in each of these periods there were types in- 
voluntarily extending the range of life beyond the limits pre- 
vailing in that period ; and when ages of extreme conditions 
prevailed, it was these marginal typfes which survived to in- 
herit the depopulated world. 

That perhaps is the most general statement we can make 
about the story of the geological record ; it is a story of widen- 
ing range. Classes, genera, and species of animals appear and 
disappear, but the range widens. It widens always. Life 
has never had so great a range as it has to-day. Life to-day, 
in the fonn of man, goes higher in the air than it has ever 
done before ; man's geogi-aphical range is from pole to pole, 
he goes under the water in submarines, he sounds the cold, 
lifeless darkness of the deepest seas, he burrows into virgin 
levels of the rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces 
to the centre of the earth and reaches out to the uttermost star. 
Yet in all the relics of the Mesozoic time we find no certain 
memorials of his ancestry. His ancestors, like the ancestors 
of all the kindred mammals, must have been creatures so rare, 
so obscure, and so remote that they have left scarcely a trace 
amidst the abundant vestiges of the monsters that wallowed 
rejoicing in the steamy air and lush vegetation of the Meso- 
zoic lagoons, or crawled or hopped or fluttered over the great 
river plains of that time. 



VI 

THE AGE OF MAMMALS 

§ 1. ^ New Age of Life. § 2. Tradition Comes into the 
World. § 3. An Age of Brain Growth. § 4. The World 
Grows Hard Again. 

§ 1 

THE third great division of the geological record, the 
Cainozoic, opens with a world already physically very 
like the world we live in to-day. Probably the day 
was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery had be- 
come very modern in its character. Climate was, of course, 
undergoing, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations ; 
lands that are temperate to-day have passed, since the Cainozoic 
age began, through phases of great warmth, intense cold, and 
extreme dryness; but the landscape, if it altered, altered to 
nothing that cannot still be paralleled to-day in some part of 
the world or other. In the place of the cycads, sequoias, and 
strange conifers of the Mesozoic, the plant names that now 
appear in the lists of fossils include birch, beech, holly, tulip 
trees, ivy, sweet giim, bread-fruit trees. Flowers had developed 
concurrently with bees and butterflies. Palms were now very 
important. Such plants had already been in evidence in the 
later levels of the (American Cretaceous) Mesozoic, but now 
they dominated the scene altogether. Grass was becoming a 
great fact in the world. Certain grasses, too, had appeared in 
the later Mesozoic, but only with the Cainozoic period came 
grass plains and turf spreading wide over a world that was 
once barren stone. 

The period opened with a long phase of considerable warmth ; 
then the world cooled. And in the opening of this third part 
of the record, this Cainozoic period, a gigantic crumpling of 

37 



38 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the earth's crust and an upheaval of mountain ranges was in 
progress. The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, are all Cain- 
ozoic mountain ranges; the background o£ an early Cainozoic 
scene to be typical should display an active volcano or so. It 
must have been an age of great earthquakes. 

Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic 
period, and it v^ill be convenient to name them here and to 
indicate their climate. First comes the Eocene (dawn of re^ 
cent life), an age of exceptional warmth in the world's his- 
tory, subdivided into an older and newer Eocene; then the 
Oligocene (but little of recent life), in which the climate was 
still equable. The Miocene (with living species still in a 
minority) was the gi-eat age of mountain building, and the 
general temj>erature was falling. In the Pliocene (more living 
than extinct species), climate was very much as its present 
phase; but with the Pleistocene (a great majority of living 
species) there set in a long period of extreme conditions — it 
was the Great Ice Age. Glaciers spread from the poles towards 
the equator, until England to the Thames was covered in ice. 
Thereafter to our own time came a period of partial recovery. 
We may be moving now towards a warmer phase. Half a mil- 
lion years hence this may be a much sunnier and pleasanter 
world to live in than it is to-day. 

§ 2 

In the forests and following the grass over the Eocene plains 
there appeared for the first time a variety and abundance of 
mammals. Before we proceed to any description of these mam- 
mals, it may be well to note in general terms what a mammal is. 

From the appearance of the vertebrated animals in the Lower 
Palspozoic Age, when the fish first swarmed out into the sea, 
there has been a steady progressive development of vertebrated 
creatures. A fish is a vertebrated animal that breathes by 
gills and can live only in water. An amphibian may be de- 
scribed as a fish that has added to its gill-breathing the power 
of breathing air with its swimming-bladder in adult life, and 
that has also developed limbs with five toes to them in place 
of the fins of a fish. A tadpole is for a time a fish, it becomes 
a land creature as it develops. A reptile is a further stage in 
this detachment from water; it is an amphibian that is no 



THE AGE OF MAMMALS 



39 



longer amphibious ; it passes tliroug-h its tadpole stage — its fish 
stage that is — in an egg. From the beginning it must breathe 
in air; it can never breathe under water as a tadpole can do. 



Some OUaocctie IMamitval^ 







!N'ow a modem mammal is really a sort of reptile that has de- 
veloped a peculiarly effective protective covering, hair ; and 
that also retains its eggs in the body until they hatch so that 



40 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

it brings forth living young (viviparous), and even after 
birth it cares for them and feeds them by its mammae for a 
longer or shorter period. Some reptiles, some vipers for ex- 
ample, are viviparous, but none stand by their young as the real 
mammals do. Both the birds and the mammals, which escaped 
whatever destructive forces made an end to the Mesozoic rep- 
tiles, and which survived to dominate the Cainozoic world, 
have these two things in common; first, a far more effective 
protection against changes of temperature than any other 
variation of the reptile type ever produced, and, secondly, a 
peculiar care for their eggs, the bird by incubation and the 
mammal by retention, and a disposition to look after the young 
for a certain period after hatching or birth. There is by com- 
parison the greatest carelessness about offspring in the reptile. 

Hair was evidently the earliest distinction of the mammals 
from the rest of the reptiles. It is doubtful if the particular 
Theriodont reptiles who were developing hair in the early 
Mesozoic were viviparous. Two mammals survive to this day 
which not only do not suckle their young,^ but which lay eggs, 
the Omithorhynchus and the Echidna, and in the Eocene there 
were a number of allied forms. They are the survivors of 
what was probably a much larger number and variety of small 
egg-laying hairy creatures, hairy reptiles, hoppers, climbers, 
and runners, which included the Mesozoic ancestors of all ex- 
isting mammals up to and including man. 

Now we may put the essential facts about mammalian re- 
production in another way. The mammal is a family animal. 
And the family habit involved the possibility of a new sort of 
continuity of experience in the world. Compare the com- 
pletely closed-in life of an individual lizard with the life of 
even a quite lowly mammal of almost any kind. The former 
has no mental continuity with anything beyond itself; it is a 
little self-contained globe of experience that serves its purpose 
and ends; but the latter "picks up" from its mother, and 
"hands on" to its offspring. All the mammals, except for the 
two genera we have named, had already before the lower Eocene 
age arrived at this stage of pre-adult dependence and imitation. 

*They secrete a nutritive fluid on which the young feeds from glands 
scattered over the skin. But the glands are not gathered together into 
mammiE with nipples for suckling. The stufl" oozes out, the mother lies 
on her back, and the young browse upon her moist skin. 



THE AGE OF MAMMALS 



41 



They were all more or less imitative in youth and capable of a 
certain modicum of education ; they all, as a part of their de- 



AlaitinvaL? 





Mi' 
Six-foo-t man 
orciwrL fe> 



l^icrorcrzis 




(oc^ctrt' nors-e) 







velopment, received a certain amount of care and example and 
even direction from their mother. This is as true of the hysena 
and rhinoceros as it is of the dog or man; the difference of 



42 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

educability is enormous, but the fact of protection and educa- 
bility in the young stage is undeniable. So far as the verte- 
brated animals go, these new mammals, with their viviparous, 
young-protecting disposition, and these new birds, with their 
incubating, young-protecting disposition, introduce at the open- 
ing of the Cainozoic period a fresh thing into the expanding 
story of life, namely, social association, the addition to hard 
and inflexible instinct of iradition, and the nervous organisa- 
tion necessary to receive tradition. 

All the innovations that come into the history of life begin 
very humbly. The supply of blood-vessels in the swimming- 
bladder of the mudhsh in the lower Palaeozoic torrent-river, 
that enabled it to pull through a season of drought, would 
have seemed at that time to that bodiless visitant to our planet 
we have already imagined, a very unimportant side fact in 
that ancient world of great sharks and plated fishes, sea 
scorpions, and coral reefs and seaweed ; but it opened the nar- 
row way by which the land vertebrates arose to predominance. 
The mudfish would have seemed then a poor refugee from the 
too crowded and aggressive life of the sea. But once lungs 
were launched into the world, every line of descent that had 
lungs went on improving them. So, too, in the upper Palaeozoic, 
the fact that some of the Amphibia were losing their "amphibi- 
ousness" by a retardation of hatching of their eggs, would have 
appeared a mere response to the distressful dangers that threat- 
ened the young tadpole. Yet that prepared the conquest of 
the dry land for the triumphant multitude of the Mesozoic 
reptiles. It opened a new direction towards a free and vigor- 
ous land-life along which all the reptilian animals moved. And 
this viviparous, young-tending training that the ancestral mam- 
malia underwent during that age of inferiority and hardship 
for them, set going in the world a new continuity of percep- 
tion, of which even man to-day only begins to appreciate the 
significance. 



A number of types of mammal already appear in the Eocene. 
Some are difterentiating in one direction, and some in another, 
some are perfecting themselves as herbivorous quadrupeds, 
some leap and climb among the trees, some turn back to the 
water to swim, but all types are unconsciously exploiting and 



THE AGE OF MAMMALS 43 

developing the brain which is the instrument of this new power 
of acquisition and educability. In the Eocene rocks are found 
small early predecessors of the horse (Eohippus), tiny camels, 
pigs, early tapirs, early hedgehogs, monkeys and lemurs, 
opossums and carnivores. Now, all these were more or less 
ancestral to living forms, and all have brains relatively much 
smaller than their living representatives. There is, for in- 
stance, an early rhinoceros-like beast, Titanotherium, with a 
brain not one tenth the size of that of the existing rhinoceros. 
The latter is by no means a perfect type of the attentive and 
submissive student, but even so it is ten times more observant 
and teachable than its predecessor. This sort of thing is true 
of all the orders and families that survive until to-day. All 
the Cainozoic mammals were doing this one thing in common 
under the urgency of a common necessity ; they were all grow- 
ing brain. It was a parallel advance. In the same order or 
family to-day, the brain is usually from six to ten times what 
it was in the Eocene ancestor. 

The Eocene period displayed a series of herbivorous brutes 
of which no representative survives to-day. Such were the 
Uintatheres and the Titanotheres. They were ousted by more 
specialized gi-aminivorous forms as grass spread over the world. 
In pursuit of such beasts came great swarms of primitive dogs, 
some as big as bears, and the first cats, one in particular (Snii- 
lodon), a small fierce-looking creature with big knife-like 
canines, the first sabre-toothed tiger, which was to develop into 
greater things. American deposits in the Miocene display a 
great variety of camels, giraffe camels with long necks, gazelle 
camels, llamas, and true camels. North America, throughout 
most of the Cainozoic period, appears to have been in open and 
easy continuation with Asia, and when at last the glaciers of 
the Great Ice Age, and then the Bering Strait, came to separate 
the two great continental regions, the last camels were left in the 
old world and the llamas in the new. 

In the Eocene the first ancestors of the elephants appear in 
northern Africa as snouted creatures; the elephant's trunk 
dawned on the world in the Miocene. 

One group of creatures is of peculiar interest in a history that 
is mainly to be the story of mankind. We find fossils in the 
Eocene of monkeys and lemurs, but of one particular creature 
we have as yet not a single bone. It must have been a creature 



44 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

half ape, half monkey; it clambered about the trees and ran, 
and probably ran well, on its hind-legs upon the ground. It 
was small-brained by our present standards, but it had clever 
hands with wdiich it handled fruits and beat nuts upon the 
rocks and caught up sticks and stones to smite its fellows. 
Spite of the lack of material evidence, the facts of biological 
science almost compel us to believe that such a creature existed, 
the common ancestor of the anthropoid apes and the two species 
of men we will describe in the next chapter. 

§ 4 

Through millions of simian generations the spinning world 
circled about the sun ; slowly its orbit, which may have been 
nearly circular during the equable days of the early Eocene, 
was drawn by the attraction of the circling outer planets into 
a more elliptical form. Its axis of rotation, which had always 
heeled over to the plane of its orbit, as the mast of a yacht under 
sail heels over to the level of the water, heeled over by imper- 
ceptible degrees a little more and a little more. And each year 
its summer point shifted a little further from perihelion round 
its path. These were small changes to happen to a one-inch ball, 
circling at a distance of 330 yards from a flaming sun nine feet 
across, in the course of a few million years. They were changes 
an immortal astronomer in Neptune, watching the earth from 
age to age, would have found almost imperceptible. But from 
the point of view of the surviving mammalian life of the 
Miocene, they mattered profoundly. Age by age the winters 
grew on the whole colder and harder and a few hours longer 
relatively to the summers in a thousand years; age by age 
the summers grew briefer. On an average the winter snow 
lay a little later in the spring in each century, and the glaciers 
in the northern mountains gained an inch this year, receded 
half an inch next, came on again a few inches. . . . 

The Record of the Rocks tells of the increasing chill. The 
Pliocene was a temperate time, and many of the warmth-loving 
plants and animals had gone. Then, rather less deliberately, 
some feet or some inches every year, the ice came on. 

An arctic fauna, musk ox, woolly mammoth, woolly rhino- 
ceros, lemming, ushers in the Pleistocene. Over North Amer- 
ica, and Europe and Asia alike, the ice advanced. For thou- 



THE AGE OF MAMMALS 45 

sands of years it advanced, and then for thousands of years it 
receded, to advance again. Europe down to the Baltic shores, 
Britain down to the Thames, North America down to New 
England, and more centrally as far south as Ohio, lay for ages 
under the glaciers. Enormous volumes of water were with- 
drawn from the ocean and locked up in those stupendous ice 
caps so as to cause a world-wide change in the relative levels 
of land and sea. Vast areas were exposed that are now again 
sea hottom. 

The world to-day is still coming slowly out of the last of four 
great waves of cold. It is not gi'owing warmer steadily. There 
have been fluctuations. Eemains of bog oaks, for example, 
which grew two or three thousand years ago, are found in Scot- 
land at latitudes in which not even a stunted oak will grow at 
the present time. And it is amidst this crescendo and diminu- 
endo of frost and snow that we first recognize forms that are 
like the forms of men. The Age of Mammals culminated in ice 
and hardship and man. 



VII 

THE ANCESTRY OF MAIT 

1. Man Descended from a Walking Ape. § 2. First Traces 
of Man-lihe Creatures. § 3. The Heidelberg Sub-Man. § 4. 
The Piltdoivn Sub-Man. § 5. The Riddle of the Piltdown 
Remains. 



THE origin of man is still very obscure. It is commonly 
asserted that he is ''descended" from some man-like ape 
such as the chimpanzee, the orang-utang-, or the gorilla, 
but that of course is as reasonable as saying that I am "de- 
scended" from some Hottentot or Esquimau as young or 
younger than myself. Others, alive to this objection, say that 
man is descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee, 
the orang-utang, and the gorilla. Some ''anthropologists" have 
even indulged in a speculation whether mankind may not have 
a double or treble origin ; the negro being descended from a 
gorilla-like ancestor, the Chinese from a chimpanzee-like an- 
cestor, and so on. These are very fanciful ideas, to be men- 
tioned only to be dismissed. It was formerly assumed that the 
human ancestor was "probably arboreal," but the current idea 
among those who are qualified to form an opinion seems to be 
that he was a "gi-ound ape," and that the existing apes have 
developed in the arboreal direction. 

Of course if one puts the skeleton of a man and the skeleton 
of a gorilla side by side, their general resemblance is so gi'cat 
that it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the former is 
derived from such a type as the latter by a process of brain 
growth and general refinement. But if one examines closely 
into one or two differences, the gap widens. Particular stress 
has recently been laid upon the tread of the foot. Man walks 

46 



THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 



47 




I 



lavs 




48 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



on his to© and his heel ; his great toe is his chief lever in walk- 
ing, as the reader may see for himself if he examines his own 
footprints on the bathroom floor and notes where the pressure 



[\?cfcrc ^i 




y^oclXy "Rhinoceros' 



falls as the footprints become fainter. His great toe is the 
king of his toes. 

Among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have 



THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 



49 



their great toes developed on anything- like the same fashion 
as man are some of the lemurs. The bahoon walks on a flat foot 
and all his toes, using his middle toe as his chief throw-off, 
much as the bear does. And the three great apes all walk on 
the outer side of the foot in a very different manner from the 
walking of man. 

The great apes are forest dwellers; their 



:ing even now 



is incidental ; they 
are at their happiest 
among trees. They 
have very distinctive 
methods of climb- 
ing; they swing by 
the arms much more 
than the monkeys do, 
and do not, like the 
latter, take off with 
a spring from the 
feet. They have a 
specially developed 
climbing style of 
their own. But man 
walks so well and 
runs so swiftly as to 
suggest a very long 
ancestry upon the 
ground. Also, he 
does not climb well 
now; he climbs with 
caution and hesita- 
tion. His ancestors 
long ages, 




Possible Appearance of the Sub-Maw 

Pithecanthropus. 

The face, jaws, and teeth are mere guess-work 

(see text). The creature may have been, much 

less human-lookine; than this. 



may have been running creatures for 
Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not 
swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to 
point to a long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and 
the sea. Almost certainly that ancestor was a smaller and 
slighter creature than its human descendants. Conceivably the 
human ancestor at the opening of the Cainozoic period was a 
running ape living chiefly on the ground, hiding among rocks 
rather than trees. It could still climb trees well and hold things 
between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can 
to this day), but it was already coming down to the ground 



50 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

again from a still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is 
quite understandable that such a creature would very rarely die 
in water in such circumstances as to leave bones to become 
fossilized. 

It must always be borne in mind that among Its many other 
imperfections the Geological Record necessarily contains abun- 
dant traces only of water or marsh creatures or of creatures 
easily and frequently drowned. The same reasons that make 
any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare and relatively 
unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the traces 
of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable 
in the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the 
earliest men, for example, is almost entirely got from a few 
caves, into which they went and in which they left their traces. 
Until the hard Pleistocene times they lived and died in the 
open, and their bodies were consumed or decayed altogether. 

But it is well to bear in mind also that the record of the rocks 
has still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only 
for a few generations, and by only a few men in each genera- 
tion. Most men have been too busy making war, making profits 
out of their neighbours, toiling at work that machinery could 
do for them in a tenth of the time, or simply playing about, 
to give any attention to these more interesting things. There 
may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still untouched 
containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his 
progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, 
there may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we 
know to-day of early men is the merest scrap of what will 
presently be known. 

The apes and monkeys already appear to have been differen- 
tiated at the beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a 
number of Oligocene and Miocene apes whose relations to one 
another and to the human line have still to be made out. Among 
these we may mention Dryopithecus of the Miocene Age, with 
a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of northeni 
India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, 
of which Sivapithecus and P alee opitli ecus were possibly related 
closely to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already 
used implements. Charles Darwin represents baboons as open- 
ing nuts by breaking them with stones, using stakes to prise 
up rocks in the hunt for insects, and striking blows with sticks 



THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 51 

and stones. The chimpanzee makes itself a sort of tree hut 
by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for use 
have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in 
Belgium. Possibly the implement-using disposition was al- 
ready present in the Mesczoic ancestry from which we are 
descended. 

§ 2 

Among the earliest evidences of some creature, either human 
or at least more manlike than any living ape upon earth, are a 
number of flints and stones very roughly chipped and shaped 
so as to be held in the hand. These were probably used as hand- 
axes. These early implements ("Eoliths") are often so crude 
and simple that there was for a long time a controversy whether 
they were to be regarded as natural or artificial productions. 
The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists as 
Pliocene — that is to say, before the First Glacial Age. They 
occur also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know 
of no bones or other remains in Europe or America of the quasi- 
human beings of half a million years ago, who made and used 
these implements. They used them to hammer with, perhaps 
they used them to fight with, and jierhaps they used bits of 
wood for similar purposes.^ 

But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond 
either to the later Pliocene or to the American and European 
First Ice Age, there have been found some scattered bones of 
a creature, such as the makers of these early implements may 
have been. The top of a skull, some teeth, and a thigh-bone 
have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about half-way 
in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, lint the thigh- 
bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and run- 
ning as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The 
creature was not a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the 
chimpanzee. It was a walking ape. It has been named by 
naturalists Pithecanthropus erectus (the walking ape-man). 
We cannot say that it is a direct human ancestor, but we may 
g-uess that the creatures wdio scattered these first stone tools 

* Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell Age preceded the earliest 
Stone Age. South Sea Islanders, Negroes, and Bushmen still make use 
of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as im- 
plements. 



52 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

over the world must have been closely similar and kindred, and 
that our ancestor was a beast of like kind. This little trayful 
of bony fragments from Trinil is, at present, apart from stone 
implements, the oldest relic of early humanity, or of the close 
blood relations of early humanity, that is known. 

While these early men or * 'sub-men" were running about 
Europe four or five hundred thousand years ago, there were 
mammoths, rhinoceroses, a huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver, 
and a bison and wild cattle in their world. There were also 
wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still abounded. There 
are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in Europe, but 
there were bears, otters, wolves, and a wild boar. It may be 
that the earl}' sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre- 
toothed tiger, and finished wp the bodies on which the latter 
had gorged itself. 

§ 3 

After this first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the 
record of geology, there is not another fragment of human or 
man-like bone yet known from that record for an interval of 
hundreds of thousands of years. It is not until we' reach de- 
posits which are stated to be of the Second Interglacial period, 
200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000 years ago, that another 
little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find a jaw-bone. 

This jaw-bone was found in a sand-pit near Heidelberg, at a 
depth of eighty feet from the surface, and it is not the jaw- 
bone of a man as we understand man, but it is man-like in 
every respect, except that it has absolutely no trace of a chin ; 
it is more massive than a man's, and its narrowness behind 
could not, it is thought, have given the tongue suiScient play 
for articulate speech. It is not an ape's jaw-bone; the teeth 
are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously 
named Homo Heidelhergensis and Palceoantliropus Heidelber- 
gensis, according to the estimate formed of his humanity or 
sub-humanity by various authorities. He lived in a world not 
remotely unlike the world of the still earlier sub-man of the 
first implements; the deposits in which it is found show that 
there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a moose, and 
so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger was 
declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The imple- 
ments of this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very 



THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 5S 

considerable advance upon those of tlie Pliocene Ag;e. They 
are well made but veri/ much bigger than any truly humaja 
implements. The Hoidelberg man may have had a very big 
body and large fore limbs. He may have been a woolly, strange- 
looking creature. 

§ 4 

We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 
years for the next remains of anything human or sub-human. 
Then in a deposit ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, 
which may have begun 100,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 
years, the smashed pieces of a whole skull turn up. > The de- 
posit is a gravel which may have been derived from the washing 
cut of still earlier gravel strata, and this skull fragment may 
be in reality as old as the First Glacial Period. The lx)ny re- 
mains discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still 
ascending only very gradually from the sub-human. 

The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation 
for road gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this 
skull were hunted out from the quarry heaps until most of it 
could be pieced together. It is a thick skull, thicker than that 
of any living race of men, and it has a brain capacity inter- 
mediate between that of Pithecanthropus and man. This crea- 
ture has been named Eoanthropus, the dawn man. In the 
same gi-avel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotarnus, 
and the leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. 
A curious bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been 
found. 

There was moreover a jaw-bone among these scattered re- 
mains, which was at first assumed naturally enough to belong to 
Eomithropus, but which it was afterwards suggested was prob- 
ably that of a chimpanzee. It is extraordinarily like that of a 
chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the greatest authorities in 
these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive analysis in his 
Antiquity of Man (1915), to the skull with which it is found. 
It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw 
of the much more ancient Homo H eidelhergensisj but the teeth 
are in some respects more like those of living men. 

Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does not think that 
EoanthrojMs, in spite of its name, is a creature in the direct 
ancestry of man. Much less is it an intermediate form between 



54 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal man we shall pres- 
ently describe. It was only related to the true ancestor of man 
as liie orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was one of a 
number of sub-human running apes of more than ape-like in- 
telligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any 
rate a very close collateral. 

After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many 
centuries gives nothing but flint implements, which improve 
steadily in quality. A very characteristic form is shaped like a 
sole, with one flat side stricken off at one blow and the other 
side worked. The archseologists, as the Record continues, are 
presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers, knives, darts, 
throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more rapid; 
in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct 
and recognizable improvements. And then comes quite a num- 
ber of remains. The Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its 
maximum. Man is taking to caves and leaving vestiges there; 
at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal near Diisseldorf, at 
Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones of a 
creature that is certainly a man. Somewhen about 50,000 
years ago, if not earlier, appeared Homo Neanderthalensis 
(also called Homo antiquus and Homo primigenius), a quite 
passable human being. His thumb was not quite equal in flexi- 
bility and usefulness to a human thumb, he stooped forward 
and could not hold his head erect, as all living men do, he was 
chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there were curious 
differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth from 
those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, 
not quite of the human species ; but there is no dispute about 
his attribution to the genus Homo. He was certainly not de- 
scended from Eoanthropus, but his jaw-bone is so like the 
Heidelberg jaw-bone, as to make it possible that the clumsier 
and heavier Homo HeideThergensis, a thousand centuries before 
him, was of his blood and race. 



VIII 

THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE 

(The Early Palipolitliic Age i) 

§ 1. The World 50,000 Years Ago. § 2. The Daily Life of 
the First Men. % 3. The Last Palceolithic Men. 

§ 1 

IN the time of the Third Interg-lacial period the outline of 
Europe and Western Asia was very dilferent from what it 
, is to-day. Vast areas to the west and north-west which 
are now under the Atlantic waters were then dry land; the 
Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these 
northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a 
great ice cap such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map 
on p. 56). This vast ice cap, which covered both polar regions 
of the earth, withdrew huge masses of water from the ocean, 
and the sea-level consequently fell, exposing great areas of land 
that are now submerged again. The Mediterranean area was 
probably a great valley below the general sea-level, containing 
two inland seas cut oif from the general ocean. The climate 
of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold temperate, and 
the region of the Sahara to the south was not then a desert of 
baked rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile coun- 
try. Between the ice sheets to the north and the Alps and 
Mediterranean valley to the south stretched a bleak wilderness 

^ Three phases of human history before the knowledge and use of metals 
are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic Age (dawn 
of stone implements), then the Paleolithic Age (old stone implements), 
and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and fre- 
quently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palteolithic 
Period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully 
human) period. We shall comment on these divisions later. 

55 



56 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE NEANDERTHAL MEN .o? 

whose climate changed from harshness to a mild kindliness 
and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age. 

Across this wilderness, which is now the gi-eat plain of 
Europe, wandered a various fauna. At first there were hipjx)- 
potami, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and elephants. The sabre- 
toothed tiger was diminishing towards extinction. Then, as 
the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other warmth-loving 
creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the sabre-toothed 
tiger disappeared altogether. The woolly mammoth, the woolly 
rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer 
became prevalent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to 
plants of a more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to 
the maximum of the Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years 
ago), and then receded again. In the earlier phase, the Third 
Interglacial period, a certain number of small family groups 
of men {Homo N eanderilialensis) and pi'obably of sub-men 
(Eoanthrojms) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but 
their flint implements to witness to their presence. They prob- 
ably used a multitude and variety of wooden implements also; 
they had probably learnt much about the shapes of objects and 
the use of different shapes from wood, knowledge which they 
afterwards applied to stone; but none of this wooden material 
has survived ; we can only speculate about its forms and uses. 
As the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the 
N^eanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted wuth the 
use of fire, began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves 
— and so leave remains behind them. Hitherto they had been 
accustomed to squat in the open about the fire, and near their 
water supply. But they were sufficiently intelligent to adapt 
themselves to the new and harder conditions. (As for the sub- 
men, they seem to have succumbed to the stresses of this Fourth 
Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest type of Palaeo- 
lithic implements presently di.sappears.) 

ISTot merely man was taking to the caves. This period also 
had a cave lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyaena. These creatures 
had to be driven out of the caves and kept out of the caves in 
which these early men wanted to squat and hide ; and no doubt 
fire was an effective method of eviction and protection. Prob- 
ably early men did not go deeply into the caves, because they 
had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in far 
enough to be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd 



58 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



corners. Perhaps tliey barricaded the cave mouths. Their 
only available light for going deeply into the caverns would be 
torches. 

What did these ^Neanderthal men hunt ? Their only possible 
weapons for killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or 
the cave bear, or even the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden 
clubs, and those big pieces of flint they left behind them, the 
''Chellean" and *'Mousterian" implements ; ^ and probably their 
usual quarry was smaller game. Biit they did certainly eat 
the flesh of the big beasts when they had a chance, and perhaps 

they followed them 
when sick or when 
wounded by combats, 
or took advantage of 
them when they were 
bogged or in trouble 
with ice or water. 
(The Labrador Indi- 
ans still kill the cari- 
bou with spears at 
awkward river cross- 
ings.) At Dewlish, 
in Dorset, an artifi- 
cial trench has been 
found which is sup- 
posed to have been a 
Palaeolithic trap for 
elephants.^ We know 
that the IsTeanderthalers partly ate their kill where it fell ; but 
they brought back the big narrow bones to the cave to crack and 
eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebrae are found in the 
caves, but great quantities of cracked and split long bones. 
They used skins to wrap about them, and the women probably 
dressed the skins. 

We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, 
because the left side of the brain (which serves the right side 
of the body) is bigger than the right. But while the back parts 
of the brain which deal with sight and touch and the energy 
of the body are well developed, the front parts, whic^ are con- 

* From Chelles and Le Moustier in France. 

'Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright's Quaternary Ice Age. 




THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 59 

nected with tboiight and speech, are comparatively small. It 
was as big- a brain as ours, but different. This species of Homo 
had certainly a very different mentality from ours; its indi- 
viduals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they 
were on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, 
or very sparingly. They had nothing that we should call a 



In Worthing-ton Smith's Man the Primeval Savage there is 
a very vividly written description of early Palaeolithic life, 
from which nuich of the following account is borrowed. In 
the original, Mr. Worthington Smith assumes a more extensive 
social life, a larger community, and a more definite division of 
labour among its members than is altogether justifiable in the 
face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson's m.emorable 
essay on Primal Law.-^ For the little tribe Mr. Worthington 
Smith described, there has been substituted, therefore, a family 
group under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions 
of Mr. Atkinson as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been 
worked into the sketch. 

Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a 
stream, because primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, 
must needs have kept close to a water supply, and with some 
chalk cliffs adjacent from which flints could be got to work. 
The air was bleak, and the fire was of gi-eat importance, be- 
cause fires once out were not easily relit in those days. When 
not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes. 
The most probable way in which fires were started was by 
hacking a bit of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves ; 
concretions of iron pyrites and flints are found together in 
England where the g;ault and chalk approach each other.^ The 
little group of people Avould be squatting about amidst a litter 
of fern, moss, and such-like dry material. Some of the women 
and children would need to be continually gathering fuel to 
keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had gi-own up. 

* Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson. 
(Longmans, 1903.) 

*This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock {Prehistoric 
Times), and Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, says that "Flints and 
pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in palaeolithic settlements 
near the remains of mammoths." 



60 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



V:)XxoM^t^iMjc $\xmc Implcmcnis 




Eably Stone Implements. 
The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of 
Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinatea, of 
sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men. 
The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram 
attached to Chapter VII. § 1, and he should note the relatively large 
size of the pre-human implements. 



THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 61 

The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps 
there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of 
the encampment. 

The Old Man, the father and master of the gi'oup, would 
perhaps be engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The 
children would imitate him and learn to use the sharpened 
fragments. Probably some of the M'omen would hunt good 
flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with sticks and 
bring them to the squatting-place. 

There would be skins about. It seems pirobable that at a 
very early time primitive men took to using skins. Probably 
they were wrapped about the children, and used to lie upon 
when the ground was damp and cold. A woman would perhaps 
be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be well 
scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then 
strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the gi-ass, and dried 
in the rays of the sun. 

Away from the fire other members of the family gi-oup prowl 
in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round 
the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the 
wandering bear and such-like beasts of prey. The Old Man 
is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are 
women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough 
to rouse the Old Man's jealousy, he will fall foul of them and 
either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps^ go 
off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep 
together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other 
group, from wdiich they may try to steal a mate. Then they 
would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when 
he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are 
worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will 
stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reigii in his stead. 
There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting- 
place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-temp©red, trouble 
and death come upon them. 

What did they eat at the squatting-place ? 

"Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the 
great hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the 
highest degree improbable that the human savage ever hunted 
animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. 
Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter. 



62 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



"The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. 
He had for food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth- 
nuts, and acorns. He had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries, 
wild gooseberries, bullaces, sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, 
hips and haws, watercress, fungi, the larger and softer leaf- 
buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance called 'fallen stars' by 
countryfolk), the fleshy, juicy, asparagus-like rhizomes or sub- 
terranean stems of the Labiatce and like plants, as well as other 
delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. He had birds' eggs, young 

birds, and the honey 
and honeycomb of 
wild bees. He had 
newts, snails, and 
frogs — the two latter 
delicacies are still 
highly esteemed in 
Noi-mandy and Brit- 
tany. He had fish, 
dead and alive, and 
frc^h-water mussels; 
he could easily catch 
fish with his hands 
and paddle and dive 
for and trap them. 
By the seaside he 
would have fish, mol- 
lusca, and seaweed. 
He would have many 
of the larger birds 
and smaller mam- 
mals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and sticks, 
or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the 
slow worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs 
and insects, the large larvse of beetles and Various cater- 
pillars. The taste for caterpillars still survives in China, where 
they are sold in dried bundles in the markets. A chief and 
highly nourishing object of food would doubtlessly be bones 
smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste. 

"A fact of gi-eat importance is this — primeval man would 
not be particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He 
would constantly find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he 




THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 63 

would relish it none the less — the taste for high or half-putrid 
game still survives. If driven by hunger and hard pressed, he 
would perhaps sometimes eat his weaker companions or un- 
healthy children who happened to be feeble or unsightly or 
burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state 
would no doubt be much sought for ; when these were not forth- 
coming, dead and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice. 
An unpleasant odour would not be objected to; it is not ob- 
jected to now in many continental hotels. 

''The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, 
with fruits, bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine 
the old man and his women twitching the skin of their shoul- 
ders, brows, and muzzles as they were annoyed or bitten by 
flies or other insects. We can imagine the large human nostrils, 
indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs at the 
foul meat before it was consumed ; the bad odour of the meat, 
and the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt 
of savages, being not in the least disapproved. 

''Man at that time was not a degraded animal, for he had 
never been higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, 
low as we esteem him now, he yet represented the highest 
stage of development of the animal kingdom of his time." 

That is at least an acceptable sketch of a ISTeanderthal squat- 
ting-place. But before extinction overtook them, even the Nean- 
derthalers learnt much and went far. 

Whatever the older Palaeolithic men did with their dead, there 
is reason to suppose that the later Iloyiio Neanderthalensis 
buried some individuals at least with respect and ceremony. 
One of tbe best-known Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth 
who apparently had been deliberately interred. He had been 
placed in a sleeping posture, head on the right fore-arm. The 
head lay on a number of flint frag-ments carefully piled to- 
gether "pillow fashion." A big hand-axe lay near his head, 
and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, 
as though there had been a feast or an offering. 

To this appearance of burial during the later ISTeanderthal 
age we shall return when we are considering the ideas that were 
inside the heads of primitive men. 

This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their 
fires, and died in Europe for a period extending over 100,000 
years, if we assume, that is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone 



64 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

belongs to a member of the species, a period so vast that all the 
subsequent history of our race becomes a thing of yesterday. 
Along its own line this species of men was accumulating a dim 
tradition, and working out its limited possibilities. Its thick 
skull im]>risoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed 
and brutish. 



IX 

THE LATEK POSTGLACIAL PALAEOLITHIC MEN, 
THE FIRST TRUE MEN 

(Later Palaeolithic Age) 

§ 1. The ComitKj of Men Like Ourselves. § 2. Hunters Give 
Place to Herdsmen. § 3. No Sub-Men in A^nerlca. 



THE Neanderthal type of man prevailed in Europe at 
least for tens of thousands of years. For ages that make 
all history seem a thing of yesterday, these nearly human 
creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw was that of a 
Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of the 
age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more 
than 200,000 years! Finally, between 40,000 'and 25,000 
years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more 
temperate conditions (see Map on p. 68), a different human 
type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated 
Homo N eaiulerthalensisJ- This new type was p^'obably de- 
veloped in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now sub- 

^The opinion tliat the Neanderthal race (Homo Neaiiderthalensis) is 
an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo 
sapietis) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which tlie 
writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this 
section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not 
share this view. They write and speak of living "Neanderthalers" in 
contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such 
types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These 
so-called "living Neanderthalers" liave neither the peculiarities or neck, 
thumb, nor teeth that disting-uish the Neanderthal race of pre-men. The 
cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have wliat we call fangs, long fangs; 
the Neanderthaler's cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized 
cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less 
marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing could show more clearly 
that he was on a different line of development. We must remember that 
so far only western Europe has been properly explored for Palteolithic 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



merged in the Mediterranean basin, and, as more remains are 
collected and evidence accumulates, men will learn more of 
their early stages. At present we can only guess where and 
how, through the slow ages, parallel with the ISTeanderthal 
cousin, these first true men arose out of some more ape-like 
progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they were acquiring 
skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in that 
still unknoAvn environment. They were already far above the 
Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first 

they come into our 
ken, and they had al- 
ready split into two 
or more very distinc- 
tive races. 

These newcomers 
did not migrate into 
Europe in the strict 
sense of the word, 
but rather, as cen- 
tury by century the 
climate ameliorated, 
they followed the 
food and plants to 
which they were ac- 
customed, as those 
spread into the new 
realms that opened 
to them. The ice was receding, vegetation was increasing, 
big game of all sorts was becom-ing more abundant. Steppei- 
like conditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were bringing 
with them vast herds of wild horse. Ethnologists (students of 
race) class these new human races in one same species as our- 
selves, and with all human races subsequent to them, under one 

remains, and that practically all we know of the Neanderthal species 
comes from that area (see Map, p. 56). No doubt the ancestor of 
Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar 
and parallel creature to Homo neanderthalensis. And we are not so 
far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed "Neanderthal," 
but "Neanderthaloid" types. The existence of such types no more proves 
that the ^'eanderthal species, the makers of the Cliellean and Mousterian 
implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do 
monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys: or people 
with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population. 




THE FIRST TRUE MEN 67 

common specific name of Ilmno sapiens. They had quite human 
brain-cases and hands. Their teeth and their necks were 
anatomically as ours are. 

We know of two distinct sorts of skeletal remains in this 
period, the first of these known as the Cro-Magnon race, and 
the second the Grimaldi race ; but the great bulk of the human 
traces and appliances we find are either without human bones 
or with insufficient bones for us to define their associated phys- 
ical type. There may have been many more distinct races than 
these two. There may have been intermediate types. In the 
grotto of Cro-Magnon it was that complete skeletons of one 
main type of these ]^ewer Palaeolithic men, these true men, 
were first found, and so it is that they are spoken of as Cro^ 
Magnards. 

These Cro-Mag-nards were a tall people with very broad faces, 
prominent noses, and, all things considered, astonishingly big 
brains. The brain capacity of the woman in the Cro-Magnon 
cave exceeded that of the average male to-day. Her head had 
been smashed by a heavy blow. There were also in the same 
cave with her the complete skeleton of an older man, nearly six 
feet high, the fragments of a child's skeleton, and the skeletons 
of two young men. There were also flint implements and 
perforated sea-shells, used no doubt as ornaments. Such is one 
sample of the earliest true men. But at the Grimaldi cave, 
near Mentone, were discovered two skeletons also of the later 
Paleolithic Period, but of a widely contrasted type, with, 
negi'oid characteristics that point rather to the negi'oid type. 
There can be no doubt that we have to deal in this period with 
at least two, and probably more, highly divergent races of true 
men. They may have overlapped in time, or Cro-Magnards 
may have followed the Grimaldi race, and either or both, may 
have been contemporary with the late Neanderthal men. Vari- 
ous authorities have very strong opinions upon these points, 
but they are, at most, opinions. 

The appearance of these truly human postglacial Palaeolithic 
peoples was certainly an enormous leap forward in the history 
of mankind. Both of these main races had a human fore- 
brain, a human hand, an intelligence very like our own. They 
dispossessed Homo Ncanderthalensis from his caverns and his 
stone quarries. And they agreed with modern ethnologists, it 
would seem, in regarding him as a different species.' Unlike 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE FIRST TRUE MEN 



69 



most savage conquerors, who take tlie women of the defeated 
side for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that 
the true men would have nothing to do with the l^eanderthal 



"RcUldccr TiOLC (Jranti -fo differing 

Articles seniles) 





pierced 
Harpoons ofreitvlecr ham 




Bone 
needles- 



Thrc 



'owtna 



-siick 



(reindeer horn) 



race, women or men. There is no trace of any intermixture 
between the races, in spite of the fact that the'newcomers, being 
also flint users, were establishing themselves in the very same 
spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know nothing 



70 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of the appearance of tlie N'eanderthal man, but this absence of 
intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, 
or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his 
low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior 
stature. Or he — and she — may have been too fierce to tame. 
Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern 
man in his Vieivs and Reviews: "The dim racial remembrance 
of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling 
gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tend- 
encies, may be the germ of the ogTe in folklore. . . ." 

These true men of the Palaeolithic Age, who replaced the 
l^eanderthalers, were coming into a milder climate, and al- 
though they used the caves and shelters of their predecessors, 
they lived largely in the open. They were hunting peoples, 
and some or all of them appear to have hunted the mammoth 
and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs. 
They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutre, 
where they seem to have had annual gatherings for many cen- 
turies, it is estimated that there are the bones of 100,000 horses, 
besides reindeer, mammoth, and bison bones. They probably 
followed herds of horses, the little bearded ponies of that age, 
as these moved after pasture. They hung about on the flanks 
of the herd, and became very wise about its habits and disposi- 
tions. A large part of these men's lives must have been spent 
in watching animals. 

Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an 
open question. Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the 
centuries passed. At any rate, we find late Paleolithic draw- 
ings of horses with marks about the heads that are strongly 
suggestive of bridles, and there exists a carving of a horse's 
head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin or tendon. 
But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful 
whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed. 
The horse they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its 
chin, not up to carrying a man for any distance. It is improb- 
able that these men had yet learnt the rather unnatural use of 
animal's milk as food. If they tamed the horse at last, it 
was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They had no 
dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated 
sheep or cattle. 

It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that 



THE FIRST TRUE MEN 71 

these earliest true men could draw. Both races, it would seem, 
drew astonishingly well. They were by all standards savages, 
but they were artistic savages. They drew better than any of 
their successors down to the beginnings of history. They drew 
and painted on the cliffs and cave walls th^t they had wrested 
from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come 
to the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the 
effect of a plain message shining through guesswork and dark- 
ness. They drew on bones and antlers; they carved little 
figures. 

These later Palseolithic people not only drew remarkably well 
for our information, and with an increasing skill as the cen- 
turies passed, but they have also left us other information about 
their lives in their graves. They buried. They buried their 
dead, often with ornaments, weapons, and food; they used a 
lot of colour in the burial, and evidently painted the body. 
From that one may infer that they painted their bodies during 
life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were inveterate 
painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white pig- 
ments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the 
caves of France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have 
shown so pictorial a disposition ; the nearest approach to it has 
been among the American Indians. 

These drawings and paintings of the later Paleolithic people 
went on through a long period of time, and present wide fluctua- 
tions in artistic merit. We give here some early sketches, from 
which we learn of the interest taken by these early men in the 
bison, horse, ibex, cave bear, and reindeer. In its early stages 
the drawing is often primitive like the drawing of clever chil- 
dren ; quadrupeds are usually drawn with one hind-leg and 
one fore-leg, as children draw them to this day. The legs on 
the other side were too much for the artist's technique. Possi- 
bly the first drawings began as children's drawings begin, out 
of idle scratchings. The savage scratched with a flint on a 
smooth rock surface, and was reminded of some line or gesture. 
But their solid carvings are at least as old as their first pic- 
tures. The earlier drawings betray a complete incapacity to 
group animals. As the centuries progressed, more skilful artists 
appeared. The representation of beasts became at last astonish- 
ingly vivid and like. But oven at the crest of their artistic 
tim© they still drew in profile as children do; perspective and 



72 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



the fore-shortening needed for back and front views were too 
much for them.^ They rarely drew themselves. The vast 
majority of their drawings represent animals. The mammoth 
and the horse are among the commonest themes. Some of the 
people, whether Grimaldi people or Cro-Magnon people, also 
made little ivory and soapstone statuettes, and among these are 
some very fat female figTires. These latter suggest the physique 
of Grimaldi rather than of Cro-Magnon artists. They are like 







^ntnhna xtv -fctar cclcurs (Cave of^lbututra. , Spain) 



Bushmen women. The human sculpture of the earlier times 
inclined to caricature, and generally such human figures as 
they represent are far below the animal studies in vigour and 
veracity. 

Later on there was more grace and less coarseness in the 
human representations. One little ivory head discovered is 
that of a girl with an elaborate coiifure. These people at a 
later stage also scratched and engraved designs on ivory and 
bone. Some of the most interesting groups of figures ai-e 
*R. I. Pocock, 



THE FIRST TRUE MEN 



73 



carved veiy curiously round bone, and especially round rods 
of deer bone, so tbat it is impossible to see the entire desi^ 



Stia itid sahaan 
enaraveA on 
xxindeerhom 







4&SSM> 

VaiztbuL pMles (AxUiatt 3Vg«) 



Sionc stahxettts' 



altogether. Figures have also been found modelled in clay, 
although no Palaeolithic people made any use of pottery. 

Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit 
caves. They are often difficult of access. The artists must 



74 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

have employed lamps to do their work, and shallow soapstone 
lamps in which fat could have been burnt have been found. 
Whether the seeing of these cavern paintings was in some way 
ceremonial or under what circumstances they were seen, we 
are now altogether at a loss to imagine. 

At last it would seem that circumstances began to turn alto- 
gether against these hunting Newer Paleolithic people who had 
flourished for so long in Europe. They disappeared. New 
kinds of men appeared in Europe, replacing them. These 
latter seem to have brought in bow and arrows; they had do- 
mesticated animals and cultivated the soil. A new way of 
living, the Neolithic way of living, spread over the European 
area ; and the life of the Reindeer Age and of the races of Rein- 
deer men, the Later Palaeolithic men, after a reign vastly greater 
than the time between ourselves and the very earliest begin- 
nings of recorded history, passed off the European stage. 



§ 2 

It was about 12,000 or fewer years ago that, with the spread 
of forests and a great change of the fauna, the long pi'evalence 
of the hunting life in Europe drew to its end. Reindeer van- 
ished. Changing conditions frequently bring with them new 
diseases. There may have been prehistoric pestilences. For 
many centuries there may have been no men in Britain or 
Central Europe (Wright). For a time there were in Southern 
Europe drifting communities of some little known people who 
are called the Azilians.^ They may have been transition gen- 
erations; they may have been a different race. We do not 
know. Some authorities incline to the view that the Azilians 
were the first wave of a race which, as we shall see later, has 
played a great part in populating Europe, the dark-white or 
Mediterranean or Iberian race. These Azilian people have 
left behind them a multitude of pebbles, roughly daubed with 
markings of an unknown purport (see illus. p. 73). The use or 
significance of these Azilian pebbles is still a pi-ofound mystery. 
Was this some sort of token writing? Were they counters in 
some game ? Did the Azilians play v/ith these pebbles or tell a 
story with them, as imaginative children will do with bits of 

' From the cave of Mas d'Azil. 



THE FIRST TRUE MEN 75 

wood and stone nowadays ? At present we are unable to cope 
with any of these questions. 

We will not deal here with the other various peoples who 
left their scanty traces in the world durinj]^ the close of the 
New Palaeolithic period, the spread of the forests where for- 
merly there had been steppes, and the wane of the hunters, 
some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We will go on to describe 
the new sort of human community that was now spreadinj^ over 
the northern hemisphere, whose appearance marks what is called 
the Neolithic Age. The map of the world was assuming some- 
thing like its present outlines, the landscape and the flora and 
fauna were taking on their existing characteristics. The pre- 
vailing animals in the spreading woods of Europe were the royal 
stag, the gi-eat ox, and the bison ; the mammoth and the musk 
ox had gone. The great ox, or aurochs, is now extinct, but it 
survived in the German forests up to the time of the Roman 
Empire. It was never domesticated.^ It stood eleven feet 
high at the shoulder, as high as an elephant. There were still 
lions in the Balkan peninsula, and they remained there until 
about 1,000 or 1,200 b.c. The lions of Wlirtemberg and South 
Germany in those days were twice the size of the modern lion. 
South Russia and Central Asia were thickly wooded then, and 
there were elephants in Mesopotamia and Syria, and a fauna 
in Algeria that was tropical African in character. 

Hitherto men in Europe had never gone farther north than 
the Baltic Sea or the British Isles, but now the Scandinavian 
peninsula and perhaps Great Russia were becoming possible 
regions for human occupation. There are no Palaeolithic re- 
mains in Sweden or Norway. Man, when he entered these 
countries, was apparently already at the Neolithic stage of 
social development. 

§ 3 

Nor is there any convincing evidence of man in America 
before the end of the Pleistocene.^ The same relaxation of the 

* But our domestic cattle are derived from some form of aurochs — 
probably from some lesser Central Asiatic variety. — H. H. J. 

'"The various finds of human remains in North America for which 
the geological antiquity has been claimed have been thus briefly passed 
under review. In every instance where enough of the bones is preserved 
for comparison, the evidence bears witness against the geological antiquity 
of the remains and for their close affinity to or identity with the modern 



76 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

climate that permitted the retreat of the reindeer hunters into 
Russia and Siberia, as the Neolithic tribes advanced, may have 
allowed them to wander across the land that is now cut by 
Bering Strait, and so reach the American continent. They 
spread thence southward, age by age. When they reached 
South America, they found the giant sloth (the Megatherium), 
the glyptodon, and many other extinct creatures, still flourish- 
ing. The glyptodon was a monstrous South American arma- 
dillo, and a human skeleton has been found by Roth buried 
beneath its huge tortoise-like shell. ^ 

All the human remains in America, even the earliest, it is 
to be noted, are of an Amer-Indian character. In America 
there does not seem to have been any preceding races of sub- 
men. Man was fully man when he entered America. The old 
world was the nursery of the sub-races of mankind. 

Indian." (Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bul- 
letin 33. Dr. Hrdlicka.) 

But J. Deniker quotes evidence to show that eoliths and early palseoliths 
have been found in America. See his compact but full summary of the 
evidence and views for and against in his Races of Man. pp. 510, 511. 

* "Questioned by some authorities," says J. Deniker in The Races of Man. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 

1. The Age of Cultivation Begins. § 2. Where Did the 
Neolithic Culture Arise f § 3. Everyday Neolithic Life. 
§ 4. Primitive Trade. § 5. The Flooding of the Medi- 
terranean Valley. 



THE Neolithic phase of human affairs be2:an in Europe 
about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. But probably men 
had reached the Neolithic stage elsewliere some thou- 
sands of years earlier. Neolithic men came slowly into Europe 
from the south or south-east as the reindeer and the open 
steppes gave way to forest and modern European conditions. 

The Neolithic stage in culture is characterized by: (1) the 
presence of polished stone implements, and in particular the 
stone axe, which was [perforated so as to be the more effectually 
fastened to a wooden handle, and which was probably used 
rather for working wood than in conflict. There are also abun- 
dant arrow-heads. The fact that some implements are polished 
does not preclude the presence of great quantities of implements 
of unpolished stone. But there are differences in the make 
between even the unpolished tools of the Neolithic and of the 
Palaeolithic Period. (2) The beginning of a sort of agricul- 
ture, and the use of plants and seeds. But at first there are 
abundant evidences that hunting was still of great importance 
in the Neolithic Age. Neolithic man did not at first sit down 
to his agriculture. He took snatch crops. He settled later. 

(3) Pottery and proi>er cooking. The horse is no longer eaten. 

(4) Domesticated animals. The dog appears very early. The 
Neolithic man had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. 

77 



78 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

He was a huntsman turned herdsman of the herds he once 
hunted. (5) Plaiting and weaving. 

These l^eolithic people probably "migi-ated" into Europe, 
in the same way that the Reindeer Men had migrated before 
them ; that is to say, generation by generation and century by 
century, as the climate changed, they spi-ead after their accus- 
tomed food. They were not "nomads." Nomadism, like civili- 
zation, had still to be developed. At present we are quite un- 
able to estimate how far the Neolithic peoples were new-comers 
and how far their arts were developed or acquired by the de- 
scendants of some of the hunters and fishers of the Later 
Palaeolithic Age. 

Whatever our conclusions in that matter, this much we may 
say with certainty ; there is no great break, no further sweeping 
away of one kind of man and replacement by another kind be- 
tween the appearance of the Neolithic way of living and our 
own time. There are invasions, conquests, extensive emigra- 
tions and intermixtures, but the races as a whole carry on and 
continue to adapt themselves to the areas into which they began 
to settle in the opening of the Neolithic Age. The Neolithic 
men of Europe were white men ancestral to the modern Euro- 
peans. They may have been of a darker complexion than many 
of their descendants ; of that we cannot speak with certainty. 
But there is no real break in culture from their time onward 
until we reach the age of coal, steam, and power-driven ma- 
chinery that began in the eighteenth century. 

After a long time gold, the first known of the metals, appears 
among the bone ornaments with jet and amber. Irish Neolithic 
remains are particularly rich in gold. Then, perhaps 6,000 
or 7,000 years ago in Europe, Neolithic people began to use 
copper in certain centres, making out of it implements of much 
the same pattern as their stone ones. They cast the copper in 
moulds made to the shape of the stone implements. Possibly 
they first found native copper and hammered it into shape. ^ 
Later — we will not venture upon fig-ures — men had found out 
how to get copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury sug- 
gested, they discovered the secret of smelting by the chance put- 
ting of lumps of copper ore among the ordinary stones with 
which they built the fire pits they used for cooking. In China, 

' Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall, and 
many other places. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 



79 



Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and tinstone 
occur in the same veins ; it is a very common association, and 
so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it 



(draMm to 
differin 
sccJLcs) ' 




may be, hit upon the harder and better bronze, which is an 
alloy of copper and tin. Bronze is not only harder than copper, 
but the mixture of tin and copper is more fusible and easier to 
reduce. The so-called ''pure^copper" implements usually con- 



80 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tain a small proportion of tin, and there are no tin implements 
known, nor very much evidence to show that early men knew 
of tin as a separate metal. ^ ^ The plant of a prehistoric copper 
smelter has been found in Spain, and the material of bronze 
foundries in various localities. The method of smeltina^ re- 
vealed by these finds carries out Lord Avebury's suggestion. 
In India, where zinc and copper ore occur together, brass 
(which is an alloy of the two metals) was similarly hit upon. 

So slight was the change in fashions and methods produced 
by the appearance of bronze, that for a long time such bronze 
axes and so forth as were made were cast in moulds to the shape 
of the stone implements they were superseding. 

Finally, perhaps as early as 3,000 years ago in Europe, and 
even earlier in Asia Minor, men began to smelt iron. Once 
smelting was known to men, there is no great marvel in the 
finding of iron. They smelted iron by blowing up a charcoal 
fire, and wrought it by heating and hammering. They produced 
it at first in comparatively small pieces ; ^ its appearance 
worked a gradual revolution in weapons and implements; but it 
did not suffice to change the general character of men's sur- 
roundings. Much the same daily life that was being led by 
the more settled Neolithic men 10,000 years ago, was being led 
by peasants in out-of-the-way places all over Europe at the be- 
ginning of the eighteenth century. 

People talk of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron 
Age in Europe, but it is misleading to put these ages as if they 
were of equal importance in history. Much truer is it to say 
that there was : 

(1) An Early Palceolitliic Age, of vast duration; (2) a 
Later Palceolithic Age, that lasted not a tithe of the time; and 

^Eidgeway (Early Age of Greece) saya a lump of tin has been found 
in the Swiss pile-dwelling deposits. 

*Tin was known as a foreign import in Egypt under the XVIIIth 
Dynasty; there is (rare) Mycenjean tin, and there are (probably later, 
but not clearly dated) tin objects in the Caucasus. But it is very diflS- 
cult to distinguish tin from antimony. There is a good deal of Cyprus 
bronze which contains antimony; a good deal which seems to be tin is 
antimony — the ancients trying to get tin, but actually getting antimony 
and thinking it was tin. — J. L. M. 

^In connection with iron, note the distinction of ornamental and useful 
iron. Ornamental iron, a rarity, perliaps meteoric, as jewellery or magical 
stuff, occurs in east Europe sporadically in the time of the XVIIIth 
Dynasty. This must be distinguished from the copious useful iron 
which appears in Greece much later from the North. — J. L. M. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 81 

(3) the Age of Cultivation, the age of the white men in Europe, 
which began 10,000 or at most 12,000 years ago, of which the 
Neolithic Period was the beginning, and which is still going on. 



We do not know yet the region in which the ancestors of the 
brownish Neolithic j>eoples worked their way up from the 
Palaeolithic stage of human development. Probably it was some- 
where about south-western Asia, or in some region now sub- 
merged beneath the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean, 
that, while the Neanderthal men still lived their hard lives in 
the bleak climate of a glaciated Europe, the ancestors of the 
white men developed the rude arts of their Later Palaeolithic 
period. But they do not seem to have developed the artistic 
skill of their more northerly kindred, the European Later 
Palaeolithic races. And through the hundred centuries or so 
while Reindeer men were living under comparatively unprogres- 
sive conditions upon the steppes of France, Germany, and 
Spain, these more favoured and progi-essive people to the south 
were mastering agi'iculture, learning to develop their appli- 
ances, taming the dog, domesticating cattle, and, as the climate 
to the north mitigated and the equatorial climate grew more 
tropical, spreading northward. All these early chapters of 
our story have yet to be disinterred. They will probably be 
found in Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia, India, or north Africa, 
or they lie beneath the j\Iediterranean waters. Twelve thou- 
sand years ago, or thereabouts — we are still too early for any- 
thing but the roughest chronology — Neolithic peoples were scat- 
tered all over Europe, north Africa, and Asia. They were 
peoples at about the level of many of the Polynesian islanders 
of the last century, and they were the most advanced peoples 
in the world. 

§ 3 

It will be of interest here to give a brief account of the life 
of the European Neolithic people before the appearance of 
metals. We get our light upon that life from various sources. 
They scattered their refuse about, and in some places {e.g. on 
the Danish coast) it accumulated in great heaps, known as the 
kitchen-middens. They buried some of their people, but not 



82 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



the common herd, with great care and distinction, and made 
huge heaps of earth over their sepulchres ; these heaps are the 
harrows or dolmens which contribute a feature to the Euro- 
pean, Indian, and American scenery in many districts to this 
day. In connection with these mounds, or independently of 
them, they set up great stones (megaliths), either singly or 
in groups, of which Stonehenge in Wiltshire and Carnac in 
Brittany are among the best-known examples. In various 
places their villages are still traceable. 

One fruitful source of knowledge alx)ut Neolithic life comes 
from Switzerland, and was first revealed by the very dry winter 
of 1854, when the water level of one of the lakes, sinking to 
an unheard-of lowness, revealed the foundations of prehistoric 




pile dwellings of the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, built 
out over the water after the fashion of similar homes that exist 
to-day in Celebes and elsewhere. Not only were the timbers 
of those ancient platforms preserved, but a great multitude of 
wooden, bone, stone, and earthenware utensils and ornaments, 
remains of food and the like, were found in the peaty accumu- 
lations below them. Even pieces of net and garments have 
been recovered. Similar lake dwellings existed in Scotland, 
Ireland, and elsewhere — there are well-known remains at Glas- 
tonbury in Somersetshire; in Ireland lake dwellings were in- 
habited from prehistoric times up to the days when O'Neil of 
Tyrone was fighting against the English before the plantation 
of Scotch colonists to replace the Irish in Ulster in the reign 
of James I of England. These lake villages had considerable 
defensive value, and there was a sanitary advantage in living 
over flowing water. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 83 

Probably these ISTeolitliic Swiss pile dwellings did not shelter 
the largest communities that existed in those days. They were 
the homes of small patriarchal groups. Elsewhere upon fertile 
plains and in more ojxjn country there were probably already 
much larger assemblies of homes than in those mountain valleys. 
There are traces of such a large community of families in Wilt- 
shire in England, for example; the remains of the stone circle 
of Avebury near Silbury mound were once the '^finest mega- 
lithic ruin in Euro}x^." It consisted of two circles of stones 
surrounded by a larger circle and a ditch, and covering alto- 
gether twenty-eight and a half acres. From it two avenues of 
stones, each a mile and a half long, ran west and south on either 
side of Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill is the largest prehistoric 
artificial mound in England. The dimensions of this centre of 
a faith and a social life now forgotten altogether by men indi- 
cate the concerted efforts and interests of a very large number 
of people, widely scattered though they may have been over 
the west and south and centre of England. Possibly they as- 
sembled at some particular season of the year in a primitive 
sort of fair. The whole community "lent a hand" in building 
the mounds and hauling the stones. The Swiss pile dwellers, 
on the contrary, seem to have lived in practically self-contained 
villages. 

These lake-village people were considerably more advanced 
in methods and knowledge, and probably much later in time 
than the early Neolithic jx^ople who accumulated the shell 
mounds, known as kitchen-middens, on the Danish and Scotch 
coasts. These kitchen-midden folk may have been as early as 
10,000 B.C. or earlier; the lake dwellings were probably occu- 
pied continuously from 5,000 or 4,000 b.c. down almost to his- 
toric times. Those early kitchen-midden people were among 
the most barbaric of Neolithic peoples, their stone axes were 
rough, and they had no domesticated animal except the dog. 
The lake dwellers, on the other hand, had, in addition to the 
dog, which was of a medium-sized breed, oxen, goats, and sheep. 
Later on, as they were approaching the Bronze Age, they got 
swine. The remains of cattle and goats prevail in their debris, 
and, having regard to the climate and country about them, it 
seems probable that these beasts were sheltered in the buildings 
upon the piles in winter, and that fodder was stored for them. 
Probably the beasts lived in the same houses with the people, 



84 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

as the men and beasts do now in Swiss chalets. The people 
in the houses possibly milked the cows and goats, and milk per- 
haps played as important a part in their economy as it does 
in that of the mountain Swiss of to-day. But of that we are 
not sure at present. Milk is not a natural food for adults ; it 
must have seemed queer stuff to take, at first ; and it may have 
been only after much breedin<2; that a continuous supply of 
milk was secured from cows and goats. Some people think that 
the use of milk, cheese, butter, and other milk products came 
later into human life when men became nomadic. The writer 
is, however, disposed to give the Neolithic men credit for hav- 
ing discovered milking. The milk, if they did use it (and, 
no doubt, in that case sour curdled milk also, but not well- 
made cheese and butter), they must have kept in earthenware 
pots, for they had pottery, though it was roughly hand-made 
pottery and not the shapely product of the potter's wheel. They 
eked out this food supply by hunting. They killed and ate 
red deer and roe deer, bison and wild boar. And they ate the 
fox, a rather high-flavoured meat, and not what any one would 
eat in a world of plenty. Oddly enough, they do not seem to 
have eaten the hare, although it was available as food. 
They are supposed to have avoided eating it, as some savages 
are said to avoid eating it to this day, because they feared that 
the flesh of so timid a creature might make them, by a sort of 
infection, cowardly.^ 

Of their agi-icultural methods we know very little. No 
ploughs and no hoes have been found. They were of wood and 
have perished. Neolithic men cultivated and ate wheat, barley, 
and millet, but they knew nothing of oats or rye. Their grain 
they roasted, ground between stones and stored in pots, to be 
eaten when needed. And they made exceedingly solid and heavy 
bread, because round flat slabs of it have been got out of these 
deposits. Apparently they had no yeast. If they had no yeast, 
then they had no fermented drink. One sort of barley that 
they had is the sort that was cultivated by the ancient Greeks, 
Romans, and Egyptians, and they also had an Egyptian variety 
of wheat, showing that their ancestors had brought or derived 
this cultivation from the south-east. The centre of diffusion of 
wheat was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region. A 

* Caesar de Bello Gallico says the Britong tabooed hare, fowl, and 
googe, — G. Wh. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 85 

wild form is still found in the neighbourhood of Mt. Hermon 
(see Footnote to Chap. XIV, § 1). When the lake dwellers 
sowed their little patches of wheat in Switzerland, they were 
already following the immemorial practice of mankind. The 
seed must have been brought age by age from that distant centre 
of difPusion. In the ancestral lands of the south-east men had 
already been sowing wheat perhaps for thousands of years. ^ 
Those lake dwellers also ate peas, and crab-apples — the only 
apples that then existed in the world. Cultivation and selection 
had not yet produced the apple of to-day. 

They dressed chiefly in skins, but they also made a rough 
cloth of flax. Fragments of that flaxen cloth have been dis- 
covered. Their nets were made of flax; they had as yet no 
knowledge of hemp and hemi>en rope. With the coming of 
bronze, their pins and ornaments increased in number. There 
is reason to believe they set great store ujx)n their hair, 
wearing it in large shocks with pins of bone and afterwards 
of metal. To judge from the absence of realistic carvings or 
engravings or paintings, they either did not decorate their gar- 
ments or decorated them with plaids, spots, interlacing designs, 
or similar conventional ornament. Before the coming of bronze 
there is no evidence of stools or tables ; the Neolithic people 
probably squatted on their clay floors. There were no cats in 
these lake dwellings ; no mice or rats had yet adapted them- 
selves to human dwellings ; the cluck of the hen was not as yet 
added to the sounds of human life, nor the domestic eg^ to its 
diet.2 

The chief tool and weapon of ^Neolithic man was his axe; 
his next the bow and arrow. His arrow-heads were of flint, 

^AU Old World peoples who had entered upon the Neolithic stage grew 
and ate wheat, but the American Indians must have developed agriculture 
independently in America after their separation from the Old World 
populations. They never had wheat. Their cultivation was maize, In- 
dian corn, a New World grain. 

' Poultry and hens' eggs were late additions to the human cuisine, in 
spite of the large part they now play in our dietary. The hen is not 
mentioned in the Old Testament (but note the allusion to an egg, Job 
vi, 6) nor by Homer. Up to about 1,500 B.C. the only fowls in the world 
were jungle denizens in India and Burniah. The crowing of jungle cocks 
is noted by Glasfurd in his admirable accounts of tiger shooting as the 
invariable preliminary of dawn in the Indian jungle. Probably poultry 
were first domesticated in Burmah. They got to China, according to the 
records, only about 1,100 b.c. They reached Greece via Persia before the 
time of Socrates. In tlie New Testament the crowning of the cock re- 
proaches Peter for his desertion of the Master. 



86 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

beautifully made, and he lashed them tightly to their shafts. 
Probably he prepared the ground for his sowing with a pole, 
or a pole upon which he had stuck a stag's horn. Fish he 
hooked or harpooned. These implements no doubt stood about 
in the interior of the house, from the walls of which hung his 
fowling-nets. On the floor, which was of clay or trodden cow- 
dung (after the fashion of hut floors in India to-day), stood 
pots and jars and woven baskets containing grain, milk, and 
such-like food. Some of the pots and pans hung by rope loops 
to the walls. At one end of the room, and helping to keep it 
warm in winter by their animal heat, stabled the beasts. The 




Huf" urns, ihe ^rst 



urohahhj rcpresenlixtcr a bike- divalxw^ . . . 
ARer luhhodfi^. 



children took the cows and goats out to graze, and brought them 
in at night before the wolves and bears came prowling. 

Since Neolithic man had the bow, he pi-obably also had 
stringed instruments, for the rhythmic twanging of a bow- 
string seems almost inevitably to lead to that. He also had 
earthenware drums across which skins were stretched ; perhaps 
also he made drums by stretching skins over hollow tree stems.^ 
We do not know when man began to sing, but evidently he was 
making music, and since he had words, songs were no doubt 
being made. To begin with, perhaps, he just let his voice loose 
as one may hear Italian peasants now behind their ploughs 
singing songs without words. After dark in the winter he sat 
in his house and talked and sang and made implements by 

' Later Palseolithic bone whistles are known. One may guess that reed 
pipes were an early invention. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 87 

touch rather than sight. His lig^hting must have been poor, 
and chiefly firelight, but there was probably always some fire 
in the village, summer or winter. Fire was too troublesome to 
make for men to be willing to let it out readily. Sometimes a 
great disaster happened to those pile villages, the fire got free, 
and they were burnt out. The Swiss deposits contain clear 
evidence of suqIi catastrophes. 

All this we gather from the remains of the Swiss pile dwell- 
ings, and such was the character of the human life that spread 
over Europe, coming from the south and from the east with 
the forests as, 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, the reindeer and 
the Reindeer men passed away. It is evident that we have here 
a way of life already separated by a gi-eat gap of thousands of 
years of invention from its original Paleolithic stage. The 
steps by which it rose from that condition we can only guess 
at. From being a hunter hovering uiK)n the outskirts of flocks 
and herds of wild cattle and sheep, and from being a co-hunter 
with the dog, man by insensible degrees may have developed a 
sense of proprietorship in the beasts and struck up a friendship 
with his canine competitor. ITe learnt to turn the cattle when 
they wandered too far ; he brought his better brain to bear to 
guide them to • fresh pasture. He hemmed the beasts into 
valleys and enclosures where he could be sure to find them again. 
He fed them when they starved, and so slowly he tamed them. 
Perhaps his agriculture began with the storage of fodder. He 
reaped, no doubt, before he sowed. The Palaeolithic ancestor 
away in that unknown land of origin to the south-east first sup- 
plemented the precarious meat supply of the hunter by eating 
roots and fruits and wild grains. Man storing graminiferous 
grasses for his cattle might easily come to beat out the grain 
for himself. 

§4 

All these early beginnings must have taken place far back 
in time, and in regions of the world that have still to be effec- 
tively explored by the archaeologists. They were probably going 
on in Asia or Africa, in what is now the bed of the Mediter- 
ranean, or in the region of the Indian Ocean, while the Rein- 
deer man was devehiping his art in Europe. The Neolithic 
men who drifted over Europe and Western Asia 12,000 or 
10,000 years ago were long past these beginnings; they were 



88 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

already close, a few thousand years, to the dawn of written 
tradition and the remembered history of mankind. Without 
any very great shock or break, bronze came at last into human 
life, giving a great advantage in warfare to those tribes who 
first obtained it. Written history had already begun before 
weapons of iron came into Europe to supersede bronze. 

Already in those days a sort of primitive trade had sprung 
up. Bronze and bronze weapons, and such rare and hard stones 
as jade, gold because of its plastic and ornamental possibilities, 
and skins and flax-net and cloth, were being swapped and stolen 
and passed from hand to hand over great stretches of country. 
Salt also was probably being traded. On a meat dietary men 
can live without salt, but grain-consuming people need it just 
as herbivorous animals need it. Hopf says that bitter tribal wars 
have been carried on by the desert tribes of the Soudan in re- 
cent years for the possession of the salt deposits between Fezzan 
and Murzuk. To begin with, barter, blackmail, tribute, and 
robbery by violence passed into each other by insensible de- 
grees. Men got what they wanted by such means as they could. 

§ 5 

So far we have been telling of a history without events, a 
history of ages and periods and stages in development. But be- 
fore we conclude this portion of the human story, we must 
record what was probably an event of primary importance and 
at first perhaps of tragic importance to developing mankind, 
and that was the breaking in of the Atlantic waters to the gi'eat 
Mediterranean valley. 

The reader must keep in mind that we are endeavouring to 
give him plain statements that he can take hold of comfortably. 
But both in the matter of our time charts and the three maps 
we have given of prehistoric geography there is necessarily much 
speculative matter. We have dated the last Glacial Age and 
the appearance of the true men as about 40,000 or 35,000 years 
ago. Please bear that ''about" in mind. The truth may be 
60,000 or 20,000. But it is no good saying "a very long time" 
or "ages" ago, because then the reader will not know whether 
we mean centuries or millions of years. And similarly in these 
maps we give, they represent not the truth, but something like 
the truth. The outline of the land was ''some such outline." 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 89 

There were such seas and such land masses. But both Mr. 
Hon-abin, who has drawn these maps, and I, who have incited 
him to do so, have preferred to err on the timid side. We are 
not geologists enough to launch out into original research in 
these matters, and so we have stuck to the 40-fathom line and 
the recent deposits as our guides for our postglacial map and 
for the map of 12,000 to 10,000 b.c. But in one matter we 
have gone beyond these guides. It is practically certain that 
at the end of the last Glacial Age the Mediterranean was a 
couple of land-locked sea basins, not connected — or only con- 
nected by a torrential overflow river. The eastern basin was 
the fresher; it was fed by the Nile, the "Adriatic' river, the 
"Red-Sea" river, and perhaps by a river that poured down 
amidst the mountains that are now the Greek Archipelago 
from the very much bigger Sea of Central Asia that then existed. 
Almost certainly human beings, and possibly even Neolithic 
men, wandered over that now lost Mediterranean valley. 

The reasons for believing this are very good and plain. To 
this day the Mediterranean is a sea of evaporation. The rivers 
that flow into it do not make up for the evaporation from its 
surface. There is a constant current of water pouring into 
the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, and another current 
streaming in from the Bosporus and Black Sea. For the 
Black Sea gets more water than it needs from the big rivers 
that flow into it ; it is an overflowing sea, while the Mediter- 
ranean is a thirsty sea. From which it must be plain that when 
the Mediterranean was cut off both from the Atlantic Ocean 
and the Black Sea it must have been a shrinking sea with its wa- 
ters sinking to a much lower level than those of the ocean out- 
side. This is the case of the Caspian Sea to-day. Still more 
so is it the case with the Dead Sea. 

But if this reasoning is sound, then where to-day roll the 
blue waters of the Mediterranean there must once have been 
great areas of land, and land with a very agreeable climate. 
This was probably the case during the last Glacial Age, and 
we do not know how near it was to our time when the change 
occurred that brought back the ocean waters into the Mediter- 
ranean basin. Certainly there must have been Grimaldi peo- 
ple, and perhaps even Azilian and Neolithic people going about 
in the valleys and forests of these regions that are now sub- 
merged. The Neolithic Dark Whites, the people of the Mediter- 



90 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ranean race, may have gone far towards the beginnings of settle- 
ment and civilization in that great lost Mediterranean valley. 

Mr. W. B. Wright ^ gives us some very stimulating sugges- 
tions here. He suggests that in the Mediterranean basin there 
were two lakes, ''one a fresh-water lake, in the eastern depres- 
sion, which drained into the other in the western depression. It 
is interesting to think what must have hapi>ened when the 
ocean level rose once more as a result of the dissipation of the 
ice-sheets, and its waters began to pour over into the Mediter- 
ranean area. The inflow, small at first, must have ultimately 
increased to enormous dimensions, as the channel was slowly 
lowered by erosion and the ocean level slowly rose. If there 
were any unconsolidated materials on the sill of the Strait, 
the result must have been a genuine debacle, and if we consider 
the length of time which even an enormous torrent would take 
to fill such a basin as that of the Mediterranean, we must con- 
clude that this result was likely to have been attained in any 
case. Now, this may seem all the wildest speculation, but it 
is not entirely so, for if we examine a submarine contour map 
of the Straits of Gibraltar, we find there is an enormous valley 
running up from the Mediterranean deep, right through the 
Straits, and trenching some distance out on to the Atlantic 
shelf. This valley or gorge is probably the work of the inflow- 
ing waters of the ocean at the termination of the period of 
interior drainage." 

This refilling of the Mediterranean, which by the rough 
chronology we are employing in this book may have happened 
somewhen between 30,000 and 10,000 b.c, must have been one 
of the gi'catest single events in the pre-history of our race. If 
the later date is the truer, then, as the reader will see plainly 
enough after reading the next two chapters, the crude be- 
ginnings of civilization, the first lake dwellings and the first 
cultivation, were probably round that eastern Levantine Lake 
into which there flowed not only the Nile, but the two great 
rivers that are now the Adriatic and the Red Sea. Suddenly 
the ocean waters began to break through over the westward hills 
and to pour in upon these primitive peoples — the lake that 
had been their home and friend became their enemy ; its waters 
rose and never abated ; their settlements were submerged ; the 
waters pursued them in their flight. Day by day and year by 
* The Quaternary Ice Age, 



NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 91 

year the waters spread up the valleys and drove mankind be- 
fore them. Many must have been surrounded and caught by 
the continually rising salt flood. It knew no check; it came 
faster and faster ; it rose over the tree-tops, over the hills, until 
it had filled the whole basin of the present Mediterranean and 
until it lapped the mountain cliffs of Arabia and Africa. Far 
away, long before the dawn of history, this catastrophe occurred. 



XI 

EAKLY THOUGHT 

1. Primitive Philosophy. § 2. The Old Man in Religion. 
§ 3. Fea?' and Hope in Religion. § 4. Stars and Seasons. 
§ 5, Story-telling and Myth^mking. § 6. Complex Ori- 
gins of Religion. 



BEFORE we go on to tell liow 6,000 or 7,000 years ago 
men began to gather into the first towns and to develop 
something more than the loose-knit tribes that had 
hitherto been their highest political association, something must 
be said abont the things that were going on inside these brains 
of which we have traced the growth and development through 
a period of 500,000 years from the ape-man stage. 

What was man thinking about himself and about the world 
in those i-emote days ? 

At first he thought very little about anything but immedi- 
ate things. At first he was busy thinking such things as : "Here 
is a bear ; what shall I do ?" Or "There is a squirrel ; how 
can I get it ?" Until language had developed to some extent 
there could have been little thinking beyond the range of actual 
experience, for language is the instrument of thought as book- 
keeping is the instrument of business. It records and fixes and 
enables thought to get en to more and more complex ideas. It 
is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, be- 
fore he could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very 
cleverly, gestured, laughed, danced, and lived, without much 
speculation about whence he came or why he lived. He feared 
the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms and big animals and 
queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no doubt he did 
things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck and 

92 



EARLY THOUGHT 93 

please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He 
made no clear distinction between animate and inanimate 
things ; if a stick hurt him, he kicked it ; if the river foamed 
and flooded, he thought it was hostile. His thought was prob- 
ably very much at the level of a bright little contemporary 
boy of four or five. He had the same subtle unreasonableness 
of transition and the same limitations. But since he had little 
or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that came 
to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them. 
The drawings even of Late PalaBolithic man do not suggest 
that he paid any attention to sun or moon or stars or trees. He 
was preoccupied only with animals and men. I'robably he 
took day and night, sun and stars, trees and mountains, as 
being in the nature of things — as a child takes its meal times 
and its nursery staircase for gi-anted. So far as we can judge, 
he drew no fantasies, no ghosts or anything of that sort. The 
Reindeer men's drawings are fearless familiar things, with no 
hint about them of any religious or occult feelings. There is 
scarcely anything that we can suppose to be a religious or mysti- 
cal symbol at all in his productions. 'No doubt he had a cer- 
tain amount of what is called fetishism in his life ; he did things 
we should now think unreasonable to produce desired ends, for 
that is all fetishism amounts to; it is only incorrect science 
based on guess-work or false analogy, and entirely different in 
its nature from, religion. No doubt he was excited by his 
dreams, and his dreams mixed up at times in his mind with his 
waking impressions and puzzled him. Since he buried his dead, 
and since even the later Neanderthal men seem to have buried 
their dead, and apparently with food and weapons, it has been 
argued that he had a belief in a future life. But it is just as 
reasonable to suppose that early men buried their dead with food 
and weapons because they doubted if they were dead, which is 
not the same thing as believing them to have immortal spirits, 
and that their belief in their continuing vitality was reinforced 
by dreams of the departed. They may have ascribed a sort of 
were-wolf existence to the dead, and wished to propitiate them. 
The Eeindeer man, wo feel, was too intelligent and too like 
ourselves not to have had some speech, but quite pi'obably it 
was not very serviceable for anything beyond direct statement 
or matter-of-fact narrative. He lived in a larger community 
than the Neanderthaler, but how large we do not know. Ex- 



94 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

cept when game is swarming, hunting communities must not 
keep together in large bodies or they will starve. The Indians 
who depend upon the caribou in Labrador must be living under 
circumstances rather like those of the Reindeer men. They 
scatter in small family groups, as the caribou scatter in search 
of food ; but when the deer collect for the seasonal migration, 
the Indians also collect. That is the time for trade and feasts 
and marriages. The simplest American Indian is 10,000 years 
more sophisticated than the Reindeer man, but probably that 
sort of gathering and dispersal was also the way of Reindeer 
men. At Solutre in France there are traces of a great camping 
and feasting place. There was no doubt an exchange of news 
there, but one may doubt if there was anything like an exchange 
of ideas. One sees no scope in such a life for theology or philos- 
ophy or superstition or speculation. Fears, yes; but unsystem- 
atic fears ; fancies and freaks of the imagination, but personal 
and transitory freaks and fancies. 

Perhaps there was a certain power of suggestion in these en- 
counters. A fear really felt needs few words for its transmis- 
sion ; a value set upon something may be very simply conveyed. 

In these questions of primitive thought and religion, we 
must remember that the lowly and savage peoples of to-day prob- 
ably throw very little light on the mental state of men before 
the days of fully developed language. Primordial man could 
have had little or no tradition before the development of speech. 
All savage and primitive peoples of to-day, on the contrary, are 
soaked in tradition — the tradition of thousands of generations. 
They may have weapons like their remote ancestors and methods 
like them, but what were slight and shallow impressions on 
the minds of their predecessors are now deep and intricate 
grooves worn throughout the intervening centuries generation 
by generation. 

§ 2 

Certain very fundamental things there may have been in 
men's minds long before the coming of speech. Chief among 
these must have been fear of the Old Man of the tribe. The 
young of the primitive sqnatting-place grew up under that fear. 
Objects associated with him were probably forbidden. Every 
one was forbidden to touch his spear pr to sit in his place, juat 



EARLY THOUGHT 95 

as to-day little boys iniist not touch father's pipe or sit in his 
chair. He was probably the master of all the women. The 
youths of the little community had to remember that. The idea 
of something forhidden, the idea of things being, as it is called, 
tabu, not to be touched, not to be looked at, may thus have got 
well into the human mind at a very early stage indeed. J. J. 
Atkinson, in his Primal Law, an ingenious analysis of these 
primitive tabus which are found among savage peoples all over 
the world, the tabus that separate brother and sister, the tabus 
that make a man run and hide from his step-mother, traces them 
to such a fundamental cause as this. Only by respecting this 
primal law could the young male hope to escape the Old Man's 
wrath. And the Old Man must have been an actor in many 
a primordial nightmare. A disposition to propitiate him even 
after he was dead is quite understandable. One was not sure 
that he was dead. He might only be asleep or shamming. 
Long after an Old Man was dead, when there was nothing to 
represent him but a mound and a megalith, the women would 
convey to their children how awful and wonderful he was. And 
being still a terror to his own little tribe, it was easy to go on 
to hoping that he would be a terror to other and hostile people. 
In his life he had fought for his tribe, even if he had bullied 
it. Why not when he was dead ? One sees that the Old Man 
idea was an idea very natural to the primitive mind and capable 
of great development. And opposed to the Old Man, more 
human and kindlier, was the Mother, who helped and sheltered 
and advised. The psycho-analysis of Freud and Jung has done 
much to help us to realize how great a part Father fear and 
Mother love still play in the adaptation of the human mind 
to social needs. They have made an exhaustive study of child- 
ish and youthful dreams and imaginations, a study which has 
done much to help in the imaginative reconstiiiction of the soul 
of primitive man. It was, as it were, the soul of a powerful 
child. He saw the universe in terms of the family herd. His 
fear of, his abjection before, the Old Man mingled with his 
fear of the dangerous animals about him. But the women god- 
desses were kindlier and more subtle. They helped, they pro- 
tected, they gratified and consoled. Yet at the same time there 
was something about them less comprehensible than the direct 
brutality of the Old Man, a greater mystery. So that the 
Woman also had her vestiture of fear for him. 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Another idea probably arose early out of the mysterious visita- 
tion of infectious diseases, and that was the idea of unclean- 
nes9 and of being accurst. From that, too, there may have 
come an idea of avoiding particular places and persons, and 
persons in particular phases of health. Here was the root of 
another set of tabus. Then man, from the very dawn of his 
mental life, may have had a feeling of the sinister about places 
and things. Animals who dread traps, have that feeling. A 
tiger will abandon its usual jungle route at the sight of a few 
threads of cotton.^ Like mcst young animals, young human 
beings are easily made fearful of this or that by their nurses 
and seniors. Here is another set of ideas, ideas of repulsion and 
avoidance, that sprang up almost inevitably in men. 

As soon as speech began to develop, it must have got to work 
upon such fundamental feelings and begun to systematize them, 
and keep them in mind. By talking together men would re- 
inforce each other's fears, and establish a common tradition of 
tabus of things forbidden and of things unclean. With the 
idea of uncleanness would come ideas of cleansing and of re- 
moving a curse. The cleansing would be conducted through 
the advice and with the aid of wise old men or wise old women, 
and in such cleansing would lie the germ of the earliest priest- 
craft and witchcraft. 

Speech from the first would be a powerful supplement to 
the merely imitative education and to the education of cuffs and 
blows conducted by a speechless parent. Mothers would tell their 
young and scold their young. As speech developed, men would 
find they had experiences and persuasions that gave them or 
seemed to give them power. They would make secrets of these 
things. There is a double streak in the human mind, a streak of 
cunning secretiveness and a streak perhaps of later origin that 
makes us all anxious to tell and astonish and impTess each other. 
Many people make secrets in order to have secrets to tell. These 
secrets of early men they would convey to younger, more im- 
pressionable people, more or less honestly and impressively in 
some process of initiation. Moreover, the pedagogic spirit 
overflows in the human mind ; most people like "telling other 
people not to." Extensive arbitrary prohibitions for the boys, 
^Glasfurd's Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle, 1915. 



EARLY THOUGHT 97 

for the girls, for the women, also probably came very early into 
human history. 

Then the idea of the sinister has for its correlative the idea 
of the propitious, and from that to the idea of making things 
propitious by ceremonies is an easy step. 



Out of such ideas and a jumble of kindred ones grew the 
first quasi-religious elements in human life. With every de- 
velopment of speech it became possible to intensify and de- 
velop the tradition of tabus and restraints and ceremonies. 
There is not a savage or barbaric race to-day that is not held 
in a net of such tradition. And with the coming of the primi- 
tive herdsman there would be a considerable broadening out 
of all this sort of practice. Things hitherto unheeded would 
be found of importance in human affairs. I^eolithic man was 
nomadic in a different spirit from the mere daylight drift after 
food of the pi'imordial hunter. He was a herdsman upon whose 
mind a sense of direction and the lie of the land had been 
forced. He watched his flock by night as well as by day. The 
sun by day and presently the stars by night helped to guide 
his migrations ; he began to find after many ages that the stars 
are steadier guides than the sun. He would begin to note 
particular stars and star groups, and to distinguish any in- 
dividual thing was, for primitive man, to believe it individu- 
alized and. personal. He would begin to think of the chief 
stars as persons, very shining and dignified and trustworthy 
persons looking at him like bright eyes in the night. His primi- 
tive tillage strengthened his sense of the seasons. Particular 
stars ruled his heavens when seedtime was due. Up to a cer- 
tain point, a mountain peak or what not, a bright star moved, 
night after night. It stopped there, and then night after night 
receded. Surely this was a sign, a silent, marvellous warning 
to the wise. The beginnings of agriculture, we must remember, 
were in the sub-tropical zone, or even nearer the equator, where 
stars of the first magnitude shine with a splendour unknown 
in more temperate latitudes. 

And Neolithic man was counting, and falling under the spell 
of numbers. There are savage languages that have no word 
for any number above five. Some peoples cannot go above 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



two. But Neolithic man in the lauds of liis origin in Asia and 
Africa even more than in Europe was already counting his 
accumulating possessions. He was beginning to use tallies, 
and wondering at the triangularity of three and the squareness 
of four, and why some quantities like twelve were easy to 
divide in all sorts of ways, and ethers, like thirteen, impossible. 

Twelve became a 
('meixhir^) jioble, generous, and 
familiar number to 
him, and thirteen 
rather an outcast and 
disreputable one. 

Probably man be- 
gan reckoning time 
by the clock of the 
full and new moons. 
Moonlight is an im- 
'portant thing to herds- 
men who no longer 
merely hunt their 
herds, but watch and 
guard them. Moon- 
light, too, was, per- 
haps, his time for 
love-making, as in- 
deed it may have been 
;for primordial man 
and the ground ape 
ancestor before him. 
But from the phases 
of the moon, as his 
tillage increased, 
man's attitude would 
Primordial man prob- 




A Carved Statue ("Menhir") of the Neo- 
lithic Period — a Contrast to the Freedom 
AND Vigour of Paleolithic Art. 



ffo 



on to the greater cycle of the seasons. 



ably only drifted before the Avinter as the days grew cold. Neo- 
lithic man knew surely that the winter would come, and stored 
his fodder and presently his grain. He had to fix a seedtime, 
a propitious seedtime, or his sowing was a failure. The earliest 
recorded reckoning is by moons and by generations of men. 
The former seems to be the case in the Book of Genesis, where, 
if one reads the gTeat ages of the patriarchs who lived before 



EARLY THOUGHT 99 

the flood as lunar months instead of years, Methusaleh and the 
others are reduced to a credible length of life. But with agri- 
culture began the difficult task of squaring the lunar month 
with the solar year ; a task which has left its scars on our 
calendar to-day. Easter shifts uneasily from year to year, to 
the great discomfort of holiday-makers ; it is now inconveni- 
ently early and now late in the season because of this ancient 
reference of time to the moon. 

And when men began to move with set intention from place 
to place with their animal and other possessions, then they 
would begin to develop the idea of other places in which they 
were not, and to think of what might be in those other places. 
And in any valley where they lingered for a time, they would, 
remembering how they got there, ask, ''How did this or that 
other thing get here ?" They would begin to wonder what was 
beyond the mountains, and where the sun went when it set, 
and what was above the clouds. 

§ 5 

The capacity for telling things increased with their vocabu- 
lary. The simple individual fancies, the unsystematic fetish 
tricks and fundamental tabus of Palaeolithic man began to be 
handed on and made into a more consistent system. Men be- 
gan to tell stories about themselves, about the tribe, iibout its 
tabus and why they had to be, about the world and the why 
for the world. A tribal mind came into existence, a tradition. 
Palaeolithic man was certainly more of a free individualist, 
more of an artist, as well as more of a savage than Neolithic 
man. I^eolithic man was coming under prescription ; he could 
be trained from his youth and told to do things and not to do 
things; he was not so free to form independent ideas of his 
own about things. He had thoughts given to him ; he was under 
a new power of suggestion. And to have more words and to 
attend more to words is not simply to increase mental power; 
words themselves are powerful things and dangerous things. 
Palgeolithic man's words, ]>erhaps, were chiefly just names. He 
used them for what they were. But Neolithic man was think- 
ing about these words, he was thinking about a number of things 
with a great deal of verbal confusion, and getting to some odd 
conclusions. In speech he had woven a net to bind his race 



100 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

togetlier, but also it was a net about his feet. Man was bind- 
ing himself into new and larger and more efficient combina- 
tions indeed, but at a price. One of the most notable things 
about the !Neolithic Age is the total absence of that free, direct 
artistic impulse which was the supreme quality of later Palaeo- 
lithic man. We find much industry, much skill, polished im- 
plements, pottery with conventional desig-ns, co-operation upon 
all sorts of things, but no evidence of personal creativeness.^ 
Self-suppression is beginning for men. Man has entered upon 
the long and tortuous and difficult path towards a life for the 
common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he 
is still treading to-day. 

Certain things appear in the mythology of mankind again 
and again. Neolithic man was enormously impressed by ser- 
pents — and he no longer took the sun for granted. Nearly 
everywhere that Neolithic culture went, there went a disposition 
to associate the sun and the serpent in decoration and worship. 
This primitive serpent worship spread ultimately far beyond 
the regions where the snake is of serious practical importance in 
human life. 

§ 6 

With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose 
in men's minds. We have already indicated how easily and 
naturally men may have come to associate the idea of sowing 
with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has pursued the development 
of this association in the human mind, linking up with it the 
conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed at seed- 
time, the conception of a specially purified class of people to 
kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a 
sacrament, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions 
of the body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial 
benefits. 

Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of 
the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for 

^Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, calls the later Palaeolithic art 
"masculine" and the Neolithic "feminine." The pottery was made by 
women, he says, and that accounts for it. But the arrow-heads were made 
by men, and there was nothing to prevent Neolithic men from taking 
scraps of bone or slabs of rock and carving them — had they dared. We 
suggest they dia not dare to do so. 



EARLY THOUGHT 



101 



women, out of the desire to escape infection and uncleanness, 
out of the desire for power and success throug:h magic, out of 
the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a number of like 






c Ittvplcttietvfcs- 



differxxia 



sales ) 




beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex 
something was growing up in the lives of men which was be- 
ginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a 
common life and action. This something we may call religion 



102 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

(Lat. religare, to bind ^). It was not a simple or logical some- 
thing, it was a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and 
spirits, about gods, about all sorts of ''musts" and ''must-nots." 
Like all other human matters, religion has gi'own. It must 
be clear from what has gone before that primitive man — much 
less his ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals — 
could have had no idea of God or Keligion; only very slowly 
did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable 
of such general conceptions. Keligion is something that has 
grown up with and through human association, and God has 
been and is still being discovered by man. 

This book is not a theological book, and it is not for us to 
embark upon theological discussion ; but it is a part, a neces- 
sary and central part, of the history of man to describe the 
dawn and development of his religious ideas and their influ- 
ence upon his activities. All these factors we have noted must 
have contributed to this development, and various writers have 
laid most stress upon one or other of them. Sir J. G. Frazer 
has been the leading student of the derivation of sacraments 
from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, following Herbert Spencer, 
in his Evolution of the Idea of God, laid stress chiefly on the 
posthumous worship of the "Old Man." Sir E. B. Tylor 
(Primitive Culture) gave his attention mainly to the disposi- 
tion of primitive man to ascribe a soul to every object animate 
and inanimate. Mr. A. E. Crawley, in The Tree of Life, has 
called attention to other centres of impulse and emotion, and 
particularly to sex as a source of deep excitement. The thing 
we have to bear in mind is that Neolithic man was still mentally 
undeveloped, he could be confused and illogical to a degree 
quite impossible to an educated modern person. Conflicting 
and contradictory ideas could lie in his mind without challeng- 
ing one another ; now one thing ruled his thoughts intensely 
and vividly and now another; his fears, his acts, were still 
disconnected as children's are. 

Confusedly under the stimulus of the need and possibility of 
co-operation and a combined life, Neolithic mankind was feel- 
ing out for guidance and knowledge. Men were becoming aware 
that personally they needed protection and direction, cleansing 

*But Cicero says relegere, "fo read over," and the "binding" by those 
who accept religare is often written of as being merely the binding of a 



EARLY THOUGHT 



103 



from impurity, power beyond their own stren^^h. Confusedly 
in response to that demand, bold men, wise men, shrewd and 
cunning men were arising to become magicians, priests, chiefs, 



1 


EUROPE 


EGYPT MESOPOTAMIA' 


18.000 B.e.- 


'& 


Men ereberm^ upon "NcoUriiic 




Reu-ieer men 






15.000 ' -- 
13.000"- 


i Tcrest itransiium) 
J 9criod 
^ AxUi«v 






10.000"- 


Europe -^^^ 


oUthic 




8.000 - - 


Txrst lalw (liivllinaA^ 


dizvclopux 


ounxcrtan. cuniUi- 

Sronzc 


6.000--- 






"Mippur 6/ ErUu 


3.000 -.. 
i.000 "■ 




Finrt-TXjna^ 


Fvrst 5uin<2rlan 


jcoo -.. 


Snmw 




Inw. 


2.000 • ■- 
1.000 - - 

A.V. 


. SfiresiAizxQ of Arjjan 
«pten. of Unguagc*- 

Iran 

• J u. L V u 

\ CKrlstia. 


V tkc G v e. 
r C a.c s Av 


19S9 "i^ 


■ .,.„.ll 



TiME Diagram Showing the Genebal Duration of the Neolithic 

Period in which Early Thought Developed. 

By this scale, the diagram on p. 47 of the period since the earliest 

subhuman traces would be 12 feet long, and the diagram of geological 

time (ch. ii, § 2) somewhere between 1,500 feet and three miles. 



and kings. They are not to be thought of as cheats or usurpers 
of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men 
are mixed in their motives; a hundred things move men to 



104 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

seek ascendancy over other men, but not all such motives are 
base or bad. The magicians usually believed more or less 
in their own magic, the priests in their ceremonies, the chiefs 
in their right. The history of mankind henceforth is a history 
of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose 
in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and 
develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowl- 
edge which may serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast 
variety of forms this appearance of kings and priests and magic 
men was happening all over the world under Neolithic condi- 
tions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where knowledge and 
mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere individual 
men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to direct, or to 
be the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of the 
community. Another queer development of the later Palaeo- 
lithic and Neolithic ages was the development of self -mutilation. 
Men began to cut themselves about, to excise noses, ears, fingers, 
teeth and the like, and to attach all sorts of superstitious ideas 
to these acts. Many children to-day pass through a similar 
phase in their mental development. There is a phase in the life 
of most little girls when they are not to be left alone with a pair 
of scissors for fear that they will cut off their hair. No ani- 
mal does anything of this sort. 

In many ways the simplicity, directness, and detachment of 
a later Palaeolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympa- 
thies than does the state of mind of these Neolithic men, full 
of the fear of some ancient Old Man who had developed into 
a tribal God obsessed by ideas of sacrificial propitiations, mutila- 
tions, and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter was 
a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but 
he killed for reasons we can still understand ; Neolithic man, 
under the sway of talk and a confused thought process, killed 
on theory! he killed for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he 
killed those he loved through fear and under direction. Those 
Neolithic men not only made human sacrifices at seedtime : 
there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed wives and slaves 
at the burial of their chieftains ; they killed men, women, and 
children whenever they were under adversity and thought the 
gods were athirst. They practised infanticide. All these things 
passed on into the Bronze Age. 

Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even 



EARLY THOUGHT 105 

dreaming in human history. Before it awakened it produced 
nightmares. 

Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, 
one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a mid- 
summer day's morning. The torches pale in the growing light. 
One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue 
of stone, of priests, perhaps fantastically dressed with skins 
and horns and horrible painted masks — not the robed and 
bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have 
been — of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and 
bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with 
pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great 
peering crowd of shock-headed men and naked children. They 
have assembled from many distant places ; the ground between 
the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encamp- 
ments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. And amidst 
the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, 
helpless,' staring towards the distant smoking altar at which 
they are to die — that the harvests may be good and the tribe 
increase. ... To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years 
ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches. 



XII 

THE RACES OF MANKIND 

1. 7s Mankind StiU Differentiating? § 2. The Main Races 
of ManJcind. § 3. The Brunei Peoples. 



IT is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a 
phrase, used often very carelessly, ''The Eaces of Man- 
kind." 

It must be evident from what has already been explained 
in Chapter III that man, so widely spread and subjected there- 
fore to great differences of climate, consuming very different 
food in different regions, attacked by different enemies, must 
always have been undergoing considerable local modification 
and differentiation. Man, like every other species of living 
thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several 
species ; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands 
or oceans or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, 
it must have begun very soon to develop special characteristics, 
specially adapted to the local conditions. But, on the other 
hand, man is usually a wandering and enterprising animal 
for whom there exist few insurmountable barriers. Men imi- 
tate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one people with 
another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been 
two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a 
multitude of local varieties, and another to remix and blend 
these varieties together before a separate series has been 
established. 

These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative 
effect in the past. Palaeolithic man, for instance, may have 
been more of a wanderer, he may have drifted about over a 
much greater area, than later Neolithic man ; he was less fixed 
to any sort of home or lair, he was tied by fewer possessions. 
Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow the migrations of his 

106 



THE RACES OF MANKIND 107 

ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have shifted him 
hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely 
and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world. 

The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those com- 
munities of mankind that took it up to the region in which it 
was most conveniently carried on, and so to favour differentia- 
tion. Mixing or differentiation is not dependent upon a higher 
or lower stage of civilization ; many savage tribes wander now 
for hundreds of miles ; many English villagers in the eighteenth 
century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight 
or ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers 
nor grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have 
enormous range. The Labrador country, for instance, is in- 
habited by a few thousand Indians, who follow the one great 
herd of caribou as it wanders yearly north and then south 
again in pursuit of food. This mere handful of people covers 
a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also range very 
widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a thou- 
sand miles between summer and winter pasture. 

It carries out this suggestion, that Palaeolithic man ranged 
widely and was distributed thinly indeed but uniformly, 
throughout the world, that the Palseolithic remains we find are 
everywhere astonishingly uniform. To quote Sir John Evans, 
"The implements in distant lands are so identical in form and 
character with the British specimens that they might have been 
manufactured by the same hands. . . . On the banks of the 
Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements 
of the European types have been discovered ; while in Soma- 
liland, in an ancient river-valley at a great elevation above the 
sea. Sir H. W. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of 
implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from 
their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift- 
deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient 
Solent." 

Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alter- 
nated with phases of settlement and specialization in the history 
of mankind. But up to a few hundred years ago it is probable 
that since the days of the Palaeolithic Age at least mankind has 
on the whole been differentiating. The species has differentiated 
in that period into a very great number of varieties, many of 
which have reblended with others, which have spread and under- 



108 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

gone further differentiation or become extinct. Wherever 
there has been a strongly marked local difference of condi- 
tions and a check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged 
to assume a variety of mankind must have appeared. Of such 
local varieties there must have been a great multitude. 

In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut- 
off population of people remained in the early Palaeolithic 
stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642. 
They are now, unhappily, extinct. The last Tasmanian died in 
1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind 
for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years. 

But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to in- 
termixture there have been certain main barriers, such as the 
Atlantic Ocean, the highlands, once higher, and the now van- 
ished seas of Central Asia and the like, which have cut off great 
groups of varieties from other great gToups of varieties over 
long periods of time. These separated groups of varieties devel- 
oped very early certain broad resemblances and differences. 
Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America, 
but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish 
buff skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. 
Most of the native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not 
all, have black or blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and 
frizzy hair. In north and western Europe a great number of 
peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and ruddy complexions; and 
about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of white^skinned 
peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of many 
of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and wave- 
less as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in 
the east than in the west. In southern India we find brownish 
and darker peoples with straight black hair, and these as we 
pass eastward give place to more distinctly yellow peoples. 
In scattered islands and in Papua and New Guinea we find 
another series of black and brownish peoples of a more lowly 
type with frizzy hair. 

But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose- 
fitting generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets 
of mankind in the Asiatic area may have been under conditions 
more like those in the European area ; some of the African 
areas are of a more Asiatic and less distinctively African type. 
We find a wavy-haired, fairish, hairy-skinned race, the Ainu. 



THE RACES OF MANKIND 109 

in Japan, They are more like the Europeans in their facial 
type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be 
a drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct 
people. We iind primitive black people in the Andaman Islands 
far away from Australia and far away from Africa. There is 
a streak of very negroid blood traceable in south Persia and 
some parts of India. These are the "Asiatic" negroids. There 



Avt^tralctcl *W«^ 




is little or no proof that all black people, the Australians, the 
Asiatic negroids, and the negroes, derive from one origin, but 
only that they have lived for vast periods under similar con- 
ditions. We must not assume that human beings in the east- 
em Asiatic area were all differentiating in one direction and 
all the human beings in Africa in another. There were great 
currents of tendency, it is true, but there were also backwaters, 
eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and leakages from one main 
area to the other. A coloured map of the world to show the 
races would not present just four great areas of colour; it 
would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and 
intermediate shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there. 
In the early Neolithic Period in Europe— it may be 10,000 
or 12,000 years ago or so — man was differentiating all over the 
world, and he had already differentiated into a number of 
varieties, but he has never differentiated into different sprcies. 
A "species," we must remember, in biological language is dis- 



no THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tinguished from a ''variety" by the fact that varieties can 
interbreed, while species either do not do so or produce off- 
spring which, like mules, are sterile. All mankind can inter- 
breed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can 
adapt itself to co-operation. And in the present age, man is 
probably no longer undergoing diffea-entiation at all. Re- 
admixture is now a far stronger force than differentiation. Men 
mingle more and more. Mankind from the view of a biologist 
is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and 
possible readmixture. 

§ 2 

It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties 
of men came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differ- 
entiations recently arrested or still in progress. Before that 
time students of mankind, influenced, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, by the story of Noah and the Ark and his three sons, 
Shem, ilam, and Japhet, were inclined to classify men into 
three or four great races and they were disposed to regard these 
races as having always been separate things, descended from 
originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possi- 
bilities of blended races and of special local isolations and varia- 
tions. The classification has varied considerably, but there 
has been rather too much readiness to assume that mankind 
must be completely divisible into three or four main groups. 
Ethnologists (students of race) have fallen into grievous dis- 
putes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to whether they 
were of this or that primary race or "mixed," or strayed early 
forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There 
are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and 
there are little gTOups that will not go into any of the four 
main divisions. 

Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood 
that M'hen we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple 
and pure races, but groups of races, then they have a certain 
convenience in discussion. Over the European and Mediter- 
ranean area and western Asia there are, and have been for many 
thousand years, white peoples, usually called the Caucasians, 
subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern blonds 
or Nordic race, an alleged intermediate race about which many 
authorities are doubtful, the so-called Alpine race, and the 



THE RACES OF MANKIND 



111 



southern dark whites, the Mediterranean or Iberian race; over 
eastern Asia and America a second group of races prevails, the 
Mongolians, generally with yellow skins, straight black hair, 
and sturdy bodies ; over Africa the Negroes, and in the region 
of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive Aus- 
TRALOiDS. These are convenient terms, provided the student 
bears in mind that they are not exactly defined terms. They 
represent only the common characteristics of certain main 
groups of races ; they leave out a number of little peoples who 
belong properly to none of these divisions, and they disregard 
the perpetual mixing where the main groups overlap. 



The Mediterranean or 
Iberian division of the 
Caucasian race had a 
wider range in early 
times, and was a less spe- 
cialized and distinctive 
type than the Nordic. It 
is very hard to define its 
southward boundaries 
from the Negro, or to 
mark off its early traces 
in Central Asia from 
those of early Mongolians. 
Wilfred Scawen Blunt ^ says that Huxley "had long suspected 
a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India, 
perhaps a long belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain 
in very early days." 

It is possible that this "belt" of Huxley's of dark-white and 
brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-brown folk, ultimately 
spread even farther than India ; that they reached to the shores 
of the Pacific, and that they were everywhere the original 
possessors of the Neolithic culture and the beginners of what 
we call civilization. It is possible that these Brunet peoples 
are so to speak the basic peoples of our modern world. The 
Nordic and the Mongolian peoples may have been but north- 
western and north-eastern branches from this more funda- 
^ My Diaries, under date of July 25, 1894. 



'B^x^]x^vomMX 


fA "^^^ 




^^W^i 




^^^^'^9m 




^t*%^3 




^;,^^_ 



112 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



mental stem. Or the Nordic race may have been a branch, 
while the Mongolian, like the Negro, may have been another 
eqnal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and 
mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may 
have developed separately from a palaeolithic stage. 

At some period in hnman history (see Elliot Smith's Migra- 
tions of Early Culture ) there seems to have been a special type 
of Neolithic culture widely distributed in the world which had 
a group of features so curious and so unlikely to have been 
independently developed in ditl'erent 'regions of the eaxth, 




as to compel us to believe that it was in effect one culture. It 
reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet Medi- 
terranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up 
the Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the 
Pacific and to Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not 
reaching deeply inland. 

This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which 
Elliot Smith called the heliolithic ^ culture, included many or 
all of the following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the 
very queer custom of sending the father to bed when a child 

'"Sunstone" culture became of the sun worship and the megaliths. 
This is not a very happily chosen term. It suggests a division equivalent 
to palaeolithic (old stone) and neolithic (new stone), whereas it is a sub- 
division of the neolithic culture. 



THE RACES OF MANKIND 



113 



is born, known as the couvade, (3) the practice of massage, 
(4) the making- of mummies, (5) meo-alithic monuments ^ (^-O- 
Stonehenge), ((i) artificial deformation of the heads of the 



^-tcm^olian. -fcu-pe^ 




Kalmudc 



Chinese 



AmcrinJLuv 



woman. 



wcmian. 



young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious association of 
the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known 
as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little 



Caucasian, "ty^^^ 




'Mediterranean "Nordur 

(Jew ofAl^^s) (En^UsJman) 



IN/t^ditcrrancan. 

(Berber) 



symbol spins gaily round the world ; it seems incredible that 
men would have invented and made a pet of it twice over. 
Elliot Smith traces these associated practices in a sort of 

^ Megalithic monuments have been made quite recently by primitive 
Indian peoples. 



114 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




2* Ul 



THE RACES OF MANKIND 115 

constellation all over this great Mediterranean-India Ocean-Pa- 
cific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They 
link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this constellation 
of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of Nordic 
or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much be- 
yond equatorial Africa. 

For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 1,000 b.c, such a 
heliolithic l^eolithic culture and its brownish possessors may 
have been oozing round the world througb 
the warmer regions of the world, drifting by 
canoes often across wide stretches of sea. 
It was then the highest culture in the world ; 
it sustained the largest, most highly de- 
veloped communities. And its region of 
origin may have been, as Elliot Smith sug- 
gests, the Mediterranean and North African <n, c^ n. 
region. It migrated slowly age by age. It lac as 
must have been spreading up the Pacific Coast and across the 
island stepping-stones to America, long after it had passed 
on into other developments in its areas of origin. Many of 
the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were 
still in this heliolithic stage of development when they were 
discovered by European navigators in the eighteenth century. 
The first civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris val- 
ley probably developed directly out of this widespread culture. 
We will discuss later whether the Chinese civilization had a 
different origin. The Semitic nomads of the Arabian desert 
seem also to have had a heliolithic stage. 



possessors may 

ft 



116 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




XIII 

THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 

§ 1. No One Primitive Language. § 2. The Aryan Lan- 
guages. § 3. The Semitic Languages. § 4. The Ilamitic 
Languages. § 5. The Ural-Altaic Languages. § 6. The 
Chinese Languages. § 7. Other Language Groups. § 8. A 
Possible Primitive Language Group. § 9. Some Isolated 
Languages. 

§ 1 

IT is improbable that there was ever such a thing as a com- 
mon human language. We know nothing of the lang-uagc 
of Palaeolithic man; we do not even know whether Paleo- 
lithic man talked freely. 

We know that Pala3olithic man had a keen sense of form 
and Attitude, because of his drawings ; and it has been sug- 
gested that he communicated his ideas very largely by gesture. 
Probably such words as the earlier men used were mainly cries 
of alarm or passion or names for concrete things, and in many 
cases they were probably imitative sounds made by or associ- 
ated with the things named. ^ 

The first langaiages were probably small collections of such 
words; they consisted of interjections and nouns. Probably the 
nouns were said in diiferent intonations to convey different 
meanings. If Palaeolithic man had a word for "horse" or 
"bear," he probably showed by tone or gesture whether he 
meant "bear is coming," "bear is going," "bear is to be hunted," 
"dead bear," "bear has been here," "bear did this," and so 
on. Only very slowly did the human mind develop methods 
of indicating action and relationship in a formal manner. 

' Sir Arthur Evans suggests that in America sign-langtiage arose before 
speech, because the sign language is common to all Indians in North 
America, whereas the languages are different. See his Anthropology and 
the Classics. — G. M. 

117 



118 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Modern languages contain many thousands of words, but the 
earlier langiiages could have consisted only of a few hundred. 
It is said that even modern European peasants can get along 
with something less than a thousand words, and it is quite 
conceivable that so late as the Early N'eolithic Period that was 
the limit of the available vocabulary. Probably men did not 
indulge in those days in conversation or description. For nar- 
rative purposes they danced and acted rather than told. They 
had no method of counting beyond a method of indicating two 
by a dual number, and some way of expressing many. The 
growth of speech was at first a very slow process indeed, and 
grammatical forms and the expression of abstract ideas may 
have come very late in human history, perhaps only 400 or 
500 generations ago. 



The students of languages (philologists) tell us that they are 
unable to trace with certainty any common features in all the 
languages of mankind. They cannot even find any elements 
common to all the Caucasian languages. They find over great 
areas groups of languages which have similar root words and 
similar ways of expressing the same idea, but then they find 
in other areas languages which appear to be dissimilar down 
to their fundamental structure, which express action and rela- 
tion by entirely dissimilar devices, and have an altogether dif- 
ferent grammatical scheme. One great group of languages, 
for example, now covers nearly all Europe and stretches out to 
India ; it includes English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, 
Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and various Indian tongues. 
It is called the Indo-European or Aryan family. The same 
fundamental roots, the same grammatical ideas, are traceable 
through all this family. Compare, for example, English father, 
mother, German vater, mutter, Latin pater, mater, Greek pater, 
meter, French pere, mere, Armenian hair, mair, Sanscrit pitar, 
matar, etc., etc. In a similar manner the Aryan languages ring 
the changes on a great number of fundamental words, / in the 
Gei-manicTang-uages becoming p in Latin, and so on. They 
follow a law of variation called Grimm's Law. These languages 
are not different, things, they are variations of one thing. The 
people who use these languages think in the same way. 



THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 119 

At one time in the remote past, in the Neolithic Age, that is 
to say 6,000 years or more ago, there may have been one simple 
original speech from which all these Aryan langaiages have 
differentiated. Somewhere between Central Europe and West- 
em Asia there must have wandered a number of tribes suffi- 
ciently intermingled to develop and use one tongue. It is 
convenient here to call them the Aryan peoples. Sir H. H. 
Johnston has called them ''Aryan Russians." They belonged 
mostly to the Caucasian group of races and to the blond 
and northern subdivision of the group, to the Nordic race 
that is. 

Here one must sound a note of warning. There was a time 
when the philologists were disposed to confuse languages and 
races, and to suppose that people who once all spoke the same 
tongue must be all of the same blood. That, however, is not 
the case, as the reader will understand if he will think of the 
negroes of the United States who now all speak English, or of 
the Irish, who^ — except for purposes of political demonstration 
— no longer speak the old Erse language but English, or of 
the Cornish people, who have lost their ancient Keltic speech. 
But what a common language does do, is to show that a com- 
mon intercourse has existed, and the possibility of intermix- 
ture; and if it does not point to a common origin, it points 
at least to a common future. 

But even this original Aryan language, which was a spoken 
speech perhaps 4,000 or 3,000 B.C., was by no means a 
primordial language or the langaiage of a savage race. Its 
earliest speakers were in or past the Neolithic stage of civiliza- 
tion. It had grammatical forms and verbal devices of some com- 
plexity. The vanished methods of expression of the later Paleo- 
lithic peoples, of the Azilians, or of the early Neolithic kitchen- 
midden people for instance, were probably much cruder than 
the most elementary form of Aryan. 

Probably the Aryan group of languages became distinct in 
a wide region of which the Danube, Dnieper, Don, and Volga 
were the main rivers, a region that extended eastward beyond 
the Ural mountains north of the Caspian Sea. The area over 
which the Aryan speakers roamed probably did not for a long 
time reach to the Atlantic or to the south of the Black Sea 'be- 
yond Asia Minor. There Avas no effectual separation of Europe 
from Asia then at the Bosporus. The Danube flowed east- 



120 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ward to a great sea that extended across the Volga region of 
south-eastern Russia right into Turkestan, and included the 
Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas of to-day. Perhaps it sent out 
arms to the Arctic Ocean, It must have been a pretty effec- 
tive barrier between the Aryan speakers and the people in north- 
eastern Asia. South of this sea stretched a continuous shore 
from the Balkans to Afghanistan. North-west of it a region 
of swamps and lagoons reached to the Baltic. 



Next to Aryan, philologists distinguish another gi'oup of 
languages which seem to have been made quite separately from 
the Aryan languages, the Semitic. Hebrew and Arabic are 
kindred, but they seem to have even a different set of root 
words from the Aryan tongues ; they express their ideas of rela- 
tionship in a different way; the fundamental ideas of their 
grammars are generally different. They were in all probability 
made by human communities quite out of touch with the Aryans, 
separately and independently. Hebrew, Arabic, Abyssinian, 
ancient Assyrian, ancient Phoenician, and a number of associated 
tongues are put together, therefore, as being derived from a sec- 
ond primary language, which is called the Semitic. In the 
very beginnings of recorded history we find Aryan-speaking 
peoples and Semitic-speaking peoples carrying on the liveliest 
intercourse of war and trade round and about the eastern end 
of the Mediterranean, but the fundamental differences of the 
primary Aryan and primary Semitic languages oblige us to 
believe that in early Neolithic times, before the historical 
period, there must for thousands of years have been an almost 
complete separation of the Aryan-speaking and the Semitic- 
speaking peoples. The latter seem to have lived either in south 
Arabia or in north-east Africa. In the opening centuries of the 
Neolithic Age the original Aryan speakers and the original 
Semitic speakers were probably living, so to speak, in different 
worlds with a minimum of intercourse. Racially, it would 
seem, they had a remote common origin ; both Aryan speakers 
and Semites are classed as Caucasians; but while the original 
Aryan speakers seem to have been of Nordic race, the original 
Semites were rather of the Mediterranean type. 



THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 121 

§ 4 

Philologists speak with less unanimity of a third gi-oup of 
languages, the Hamitic, which some declare to be distinct from, 
and others allied to, the Semitic. The weight of opinion in- 
clines now towards the idea of some primordial connection of 
these two groups. The Hamitic group is certainly a much 
wider and more various language group than the Semitic or the 
Aryan, and the Semitic tongues are more of a family, have 
more of a common likeness, than the Aryan. The Semitic 
languages may have arisen as some specialized proto-Hamitic 
group, just as the birds arose from a special group of reptiles 
(Chap. IV). It is a tempting speculation, but one for which 
there is really no basis of justifying fact, to suppose that the 
rude primordial ancestor group of the Arj^an tongues branched 
off from the proto-llamitic speech forms at some still earlier 
date than the separation and specialization of Semitic. The 
Hamitic sj>eakers to-day, like the Semitic speakers, are mainly 
of the Mediterranean Caucasian race. Among the Hamitic 
languages are the ancient Egyptian and Coptic, the Berber 
languages (of the mountain people of North Africa, the Masked 
Tuaregs, and other such peoples), and what are called the 
Ethiopic group of African languages in eastern Africa, includ- 
ing the speech of the Gallas and the Somalis. The general 
grouping of these various tongues suggests that they originated 
over some gi'eat area to the west, as the primitive Semitic may 
have arisen to the east, of the Red Sea divide. That divide was 
probably much more effective in Pleistocene times ; the sea ex- 
tended across to the west of the Isthmus of Suez, and a great 
part of lower Egypt was under water. Long before the dawn 
of history, however, Asia and Africa had joined at Suez, and 
these two language systems were in contact in that region. And 
if Asia and Africa were separated then at Suez, they may, 
on the other hand, have been joined by way of Arabia and 
Abyssinia. 

These Hamitic languages may have radiated from a centre 
on the African coast of the Mediterranean, and they may have 
extended over the then existing land connections very widely 
into western Europe. 

All these three gi-eat groups of languages, it may be noted, 
the Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic, have one feature in common 



122 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 123 

which they do not share with any other language, and that 
is grammatical gender; but whether that has much weight 
as evidence of a remote common origin of Aryan, Semitic, and 
Hamitic, is a question for the philologist rather than for the 
general student. It does not affect the clear evidence of a very 
long and very ancient prehistoric separation of the speakers of 
these three diverse groups of tongTies. 

The bulk of the Semitic and Hamitic-speaking peoples are 
put by ethnologists with the Aryans among the Caucasian gi-oup 
of races. They are ''white." The Semitic and Nordic "races" 
have a much more distinctive physiog-nomy ; they seem, like 
their characteristic langiiages, to be more marked and specialized 
than the Hamitic-speaking peoples. 



Across to the north-east of the Aryan and Semitic areas there 
must once have spread a further distinct language system which 
is now represented by a group of languages known as the 
Turanian, or Ueal-altaic group. This includes the Lappish 
of Lapland and the Samoyed speech of Siberia, the Finnish lan- 
guage, Mugyar, Turkish or Tartar, Manchu and Mongol; it 
has not as a group been so exhaustively studied by European 
philologists, and there is insufficient evidence yet whether it does 
or does not include the Korean and Japanese languages. H. B. 
Hulbert has issued a comparative grammar of Korean and cer- 
tain of the Dravidian languages of India to demonstrate the 
close affinity he finds between them. 

§ 6 

A fifth region of language formation was south-eastern Asia, 
where there still prevails a gi'oup of languages consisting of 
monosyllables without any inflections, in which the tone used 
in littering a word determines its meaning. This may be called 
the Chinese or Monosyllabic group, and it includes Chinese, 
Burmese, Siamese, and Tibetan. The difference between any 
of these Chinese tongues and the more western languages is pro- 
found. In the Pekinese form of Chinese there are only about 
120 primary monosyllables, and consequently each of these has 
to do duty for a great number of things, and the different mean- 



124 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ings are indicated either by the context or by saying the word 
in a distinctive tone. The relations of these words to each other 
are expressed by quite different methods from the Aryan 
methods ; Chinese gTammar is a thing dift"erent in nature from 
English grammar; it is a separate and different invention. 
Many writers declare there is no Chinese grammar at all, and 
that is true if we mean by grammar anything in the European 
sense of inflections and concords. Consequently any such thing 
as a literal translation from Chinese into English is an impossi- 
bility. The very method of the thought is different.-^ Their 
philosophy remains still largely a sealed book to the European 
on this account and vice versa, because of the different nature 
of the expressions. 

§ "l 

In addition, the following other great language families are 
distinguished by the philologist. All the American-Indian lan- 
guages, which vary widely among themselves, are separable 
from any Old World gToup. Here we may lump them together 
not so much as a family as a miscellany. There is one great 
group of langiiages in Africa, from a little way north of the 
equator to its southern extremity, the Bantu^ and in addition 
a complex of other languages across the centre of the continent 
about which we will not trouble here. There are also two prob- 
ably separate groups, the Dravidiax in South India, and the 
jNIalay-Polynesian stretched over Polynesia, and also now in- 
cluding Indian tongues. 

Now it seems reasonable to conclude irom these fundamental 
differences that about the time when men were beginning to 
form rather larger communities than the family tribe, when 
they were beginning to tell each other long stories and argaie 
and exchange ideas, htiman beings were distributed about the 

*The four characters indicating "Affairs, query, imperative, old," placed 
in that order, for example, represent "Why walk in the ancient ways?" 
The Chinaman gives the bare cores of his meaning; the Englishman gets 
to it by a bold metaphor. He may be talking of conservatism in cooking 
or in book-binding, but he will say: "Why walk in the ancient ways?" 
Mr. Arthur Waley, in the interesting essay on Chinese thought and 
poetry which precedes his book, 110 Chinese Poems (Constable, 1918), 
makes it clear how in these fields Chinese thought is kept practical and 
restricted by tlie limitations upon metaphor the contracted structure of 
'"linose imposes. 



THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 125 

world in a number of areas which communicated i^ery little 
with each other. They were separated by oceans, seas, thick 
forests, deserts or mountains from one another. There may 
have been in that remote time, it may be 15,000 years ago or 
more, Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Turanian, American and 
Chinese-speaking- tribes and families, wandering over their sev- 
eral areas of hunting and pasture, all at very much the same 
stage of culture, and each developing its linguistic instrument 
in its own way. Probably each of these original tribes was not 
more numerous altogether than the Indians in Hudson Bay 
Territory to-day. Systematic agriculture was barely beginning 
then, and until agriculture made a denser population possible 
men may have been almost as rare as the great apes have always 
been. If agriculture was becoming at all important in human 
life at that time, and if population was anywhere denser, it 
was probably in the Mediterranean region and possibly in areas 
now submerged. 

In addition to these Neolithic tribes, there must have been 
various still more primitive forest folks in Africa and in India. 
Central Africa, from the Upper Nile, was then a vast forest, im- 
penetrable to ordinary human life, a forest of which the Congo 
forests of to-day are the last shrunken remains. 

Possibly the spread of men of a race higher than primitive 
Australoids into the East Indies,^ and the development of the 
languages of the Malay-Polynesian type came later in time than 
the origination of these other language groups. 

The language divisions of the philologist do tally, it is mani- 
fest, in a broad sort of way with the main race classes of the 
ethnologist, and they carry out the same idea of age-long sepa- 
rations between great divisions of mankind. In the Glacial 
Age, ice, or at least a climate too severe for the free spreading 
of peoples, extended from the north pole into Central Europe 
and across Russia and Siberia to the great tablelands of Central 
Asia. After the last Glacial Age, this cold north mitigated its 
severities very slowly, and was for long without any other popu- 
lation than the wandering hunters who spread eastward and 
across Bering Strait. North and Central Europe and Asia did 
not become sufficiently temperate for agriculture until quite 
recent times, times that is within the limit of 12,000 or possibly 

^The Polynesians appear to be a later eastward extension of the dark 
whites or brown peoples. 



12G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

even 10,000 years, and a dense forest period intervened between 
the age of the hunter and the agricultural clearings. 

This forest period was also a very wet period. It has been 
called the Pluvial or Lacustrine Age, the rain or pond period. 
It has to be remembered that the outlines of the land of the 
world have changed greatly even in the last hundred centuries. 
Across European Russia, from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, 
as the ice receded there certainly spread much water and many 
impassable swamps; the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral and 
parts of the Desert of Turkestan, are the vestiges of a great 
extent of sea that reached far up to the Volga valley and sent 
an arm westward to join the Black Sea. Mountain barriers 
much higher than they are now, and the arm of the sea that is 
now the region of the Indus, completed the separation of the 
early Nordic races from the Mongolians and the Dravidians, 
and made the broad racial differentiation of those gi-oups 
possible. 

Again the blown-sand Desert of Sahara — it is not a dried-up 
sea, but a wind desert, and was once fertile and rich in life — 
becoming more and more dry and sandy, cut the Caucasians off 
from the sparse primitive Negro population in the central forest 
region of Africa. 

The Persian Gulf extended very far to the north of its pres- 
ent head, and combined with the Syrian desert to cut oft" the 
Semitic peoples from the eastern areas, while on the other hand 
the south of Arabia, much more fertile than it is to-day, may 
have reached across what is now the Gulf of Aden towards 
Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Mediterranean and Bed Sea 
may even have been fertile valleys containing a string of fresh- 
water lakes during the Pluvial Age. The Himalayas and the 
higher and vaster massif of Central Asia and the northward 
extension of the Bay of Bengal up to the present Ganges valley 
divided off the Dravidians from the Mongolians, the canoe was 
the chief link between Dravidian and Southern Mongol, and 
the Gobi system of seas and lakes which presently became the 
Gobi desert, and the gi*eat system of mountain chains which 
follow one another across Asia from the centre to the north- 
east, split the Mongolian races into the Chinese and the Ural- 
Altaic language groups. 

Bering Strait, when this came into existence, before or after 
the Pluvial Period, isolated the Amerindians. 



THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 127 

We are not suggesting here, be it noted, that these ancient 
separations were absolute separations, but that they were 
effectual enough at least to prevent any great intermixture of 
blood or any great intermixture of speech in those days of 
man's social beginnings. There was, nevertheless, some amount 
of meeting and exchange even then, some drift of knowledge 
that spread the crude patterns and use of various implements, 
and the seeds of a primitive agriculture about the world. 

§ 8 

The fundamental tongues of these nine main language groups 
we have noted were not by any means all the human speech 
beginnings of the Neolithic Age. They are the latest languages, 
the survivors, which have ousted their more primitive predeces- 
sors. There may have been other, and possibly many other, 
ineffective centres of speech which were afterwards overrun 
by the speakers of still surviving tongues, and of elementary 
languages which faded out. We find strange little patches of 
speech still in the world which do not seem to be connected 
with any other language about them. Sometimes, however, an 
exhaustive inquiry seems to affiliate these disconnected patches, 
seems to open out to us tantalizing glimpses of some simpler, 
wider, and more fundamental and universal form of human 
speech. One language gi-oup that has been keenly discussed is 
the Basque group of dialects. The Basques live now on the 
north and south slopes of the Pyrenees ; they number perhaps 
G00,000 altogether in Europe, and to this day they are a very 
sturdy and independent-spirited people. Their language, as 
it exists to-day, is a fully developed one. But it is developed 
upon lines absolutely different from those of the Aryan lan- 
guages about it. Basque newspapers have been published in 
the Argentine and in the United States to supply groups of 
prosperous emigrants. The earliest "French" settlers in Canada 
were Basque, and Basque names are frequent among the 
French Canadians to this day. Ancient remains point to a 
much wider distribution of the Basque speech and people over 
Spain. For a long time this Basque language was a profound 
perplexity to scholars, and its structural character led to the 
suggestion that it might be related to some Amerindian tongue. 
A. H. Keane, in j\[an. Past and Present, assembles reasons for 



128 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



linking it — thougli remotely — with the Berber language o£ 
]!^orth Africa, and through the Berber with the general body 

of Hamitic languages, but 
this relationship is ques- 
tioned by other philolo- 
gists. They find Basque 
more akin to certain 
similarly stranded ves- 
tiges of speech found in 
the Caucasian Mountains, 
and they are disposed to 
regard it as a last surviv- 
ing member, much 
changed and specialized, 
of a once very widely ex- 
tended group of pre- 
Ilamitic languages, other- 
wise extinct, spoken chief- 
ly ^y peoples of that 
brunet Mediterranean race 
which once occupied most 
of western and southern 
Europe and western Asia, 
and which may have been 
very closely related to the 
Dravidians of India and 
the peoples with a helio- 
lithic culture who spread 
eastward, thence through 
the East Indies to Poly- 
nesia and beyond. 

It is quite possible that 
over western and southern 
Europe language groups 
extended eight or ten thou- 
sand years ago that have 
completely vanished be- 
fore Aryan tongues. Later on we shall note, in passing, the 
possibility of three lost language groups represented by (1) 
Ancient Cretan, Lydian, and the like (though these may have 




THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND 129 

belonged, says Sir H. H. Johnston, to the "Basque — Caucasian 
— Dravidian 11] group"), (2) 8umerian, and (3) Elamite. 
The. suggestion has been made — it is a mere guess — that an- 
cient Sumerian may have been a linking language between the 
early Basque-Caucasian and early Mongolian groups. If this 
is true, then we have in this "Basque-Caucasian-Dravidian- 
Sumerian-proto-Mongolian" group a still more ancient and 
more ancestral system of speech than the fundamental Hamitic. 
We have something more like the linguistic "missing link," 
more like an ancestral language than anything else we can 
imagine at the present time. It may have been related to the 
Aryan and Semitic and Hamitic languages much as the primi- 
tive lizards of later Palaeozoic times were related to the mam- 
mals, birds, and dinosaurs respectively. 

§ 9 

The Hottentot language is said to have affinities with the 
Hamitic tongues, from which it is separated by the whole 
breadth of Bantu-speaking Central Africa. A Hottentot-like 
language with Bushman affinities is still spoken in equatorial 
East Africa, and this strengthens the idea that the whole of 
East Africa was once Ilamitic-speaking. The Bantu languages 
and peoples spread, in comparatively recent times, from some 
centre of origin in West Central Africa and cut off the Hotten- 
tots from the other Hamitic peoples. But it is at least equally 
probable that the Hottentot is a separate language group. 

Among other remote and isolated little patches of language 
are the Papuan speech of New Guinea and the native Aus- 
tralian. The now extinct Tasmanian language is but little 
known. What we do know of it is in support of what we have 
guessed about the comparative speechlessness of Palaeolithic 
man. 

We naay quote a passage from Hutchinson's Limng Races of 
Mankind upon this matter : — 

"The language of the natives is irretrievably lost, only im- 
perfect indications of its structure and a small proportion of 
its words having been preserved. In the absence of sibilants 
and some other features, their dialects resembled the Australian, 
but were of ruder, of less developed structure, and so imperfect 
that, according to Joseph Milligan, our best authority on the 



ISO THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

subject, they observed no settled order or arrangement of words 
in the construction of their sentences, but conveyed in a supple^ 
mentary fashion by tone, manner, and gesture those modifica- 
tions of meaning which we express by mood, tense, number, etc. 
Abstract terms were rare; for every variety of gum-tree or 
wattle-tree there was a name, but no word for 'tree' in general, 
nor for qualities such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, 
round, etc. Anything hard was 'like a stone,' anything round 
'like the moon,' and so on, usually suiting the action to the 
word and confirming by some sign the meaning to be 
understood." 



XIV 

THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 

§ 1. Early Cities and Early Nomads. § 2a. The Sumerians. 
§ 2b. The Empire of Sargon the First. § 2c, The Empire 
of Hammurabi. § 2d. The Assyrians and their Empire. 
§ 2e. The Chaldean Empire. § 3. The Early History of 
^9ypi- § 4. The Early Civilization of India. § 5. The 
Early History of China. § 6. \Yhile the CivilizatioTis were 
Growing. 

§ 1 

IT was out of the so-called heliolithic culture we have 
described in Chapter XII that the first beginnings of any- 
thing that we can call a civilization arose. It is still doubt- 
ful whether we are to consider Mesopotamia or Egypt the earlier 
scene of the two parallel beginnings of settled communities liv- 
ing in towns. By 4,000 B.C., in both these regions of the earth, 
such communities existed, and had been going on for a very 
considerable time. The excavations of the American expedition 
at Nippur have unearthed evidence of a city community ex- 
isting there at least as early as 5,000 b.c, and probably as early 
as 6,000 B.C., an earlier date than anything we know of in 
Egypt. The late Mr. Aaron Aaronson found a real wild wheat 
upon the slopes of Mt. Ilermon, and it must be that somewhere 
in that part of the world its cultivation began. It may be that 
from the western end of the Mediteranean, possibly in some 
region now submerged, as a centre that the cultivation of wheat 
spread over the entire eastern hemisphere. But cultivation is 
^not civilization ; the growing of wheat had spread from the At- 
lantic to the Pacific coast with the distribution of the Neolithic 
culture by perhaps 15,000 or 10,000 b.c, before the beginnings 
of civilization. Civilization is something more than the occa- 
sional seasonal growing of wheat. It is the settlement of men 
upon an area continuously cultivated and possessed, who live in 

131 



132 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

buildings continuously inhabited with a common rule and a com- 
mon city or citadel. For a long time civilization may quite pos- 
sibly have developed in Mesopotamia without any relations with 
the parallel beginnings in Egypt. The two settlements may 
have been quite independent, arising separately out of the 
widely diffused Heliolithic Neolithic culture. Or they may 
have had a common origin in the region of the Mediterranean, 
the Red Sea, and southern Arabia. 

The first condition necessary to a real settling down of Neo- 
lithic men, as distinguished from a mere temporary settlement 
among abundant food, was of course a trustworthy all-the-year- 
ropnd supply of water, fodder for the animals, food for them- 
selves, and building material for their homes. There had to 
be everything they could need at any season, and no want that 
would tempt them to wander further. This was a possible state 
of affairs, no doubt, in many European and Asiatic valleys ; 
and in many such valleys, as in the case of the Swiss lake dwell- 
ings, men settled from a very early date indeed ; but nowhere, 
of any countries now known to us, were these favourable con- 
ditions found upon such a scale, and nowhere did thef hold 
good so surely year in and year out as in Egypt and in the 
country between the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris 
and the Persian Gulf.^ Here was a constant water supply un- 
der enduring sunlight; trustworthy harvests year by year; in 
Mesopotamia wheat yielded, says Herodotus, two hundredfold 
to the sower ; Pliny says that it was cut twice and afterwards 
yielded good fodder for sheep ; there were abundant palms and 
many sorts of fruits; and as for building material, in Egypt 
there was clay and easily worked stone, and in Mesopotamia a 
clay that becomes a brick in the sunshine. In such countries 
men would cease to wander and settle down almost unawares ; 
they would multiply and discover themselves numerous and by 
their numbers safe from any casual assailant. They multiplied, 
producing a denser human population than the earth had ever 
known before ; their houses became more substantial, wild beasts 

* We shall use " Mesopotamia" here loosely for the Euphrates-Tigris 
country generally. Strictly, of course, as its name indicates, Mesopotamia 
(mid-rivers) means only the country between those two great rivers. That 
country in the fork was probably very marshy and unhealthy in early 
times (Sayce), until it was drained by man, and the early cities grew 
up west of the Euphrates and east of the Tigris. Probably these rivers 
then flowed separately into the Persian Gulf. 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 



133 



were exterminated over great areas, the security of life in- 
creased so that ordinary men went about in the towns and fields 
without encumbering themselves with weapons, and among 
themselves, at least, they became peaceful peoples. Men took 
root as man had never taken root before. 




iSteppe^.. 
Mcnmtain,- 



CIVILIZATION 

6,000 to 4.000 B.C. 



But in the less fertile and more seasonal lands outside 
favoured areas, in the forests of Europe, the Arabian deserts, 
and the seasonal pastures of Central Asia, there developed on 
the other hand a thinner, more active population of peoples, 
the primitive nomadic peoples. In contrast with the settled folk, 
the agriculturists, these nomads lived freely and dangerously. 



134 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

They were in comparison lean and hungry men. Their herding 
was still blended with hunting ; they fought constantly for their 
pastures against hostile families. The discoveries in the elabora- 
tion of implements and the use of metals made by the settled 
peoples spread to them and improved their weapons. They 
followed the settled folk from Neolithic phase to Bronze phase. 
It is possible that in the case of iron, the first users were no- 
madic. They became more warlike with better arms, and more 
capable of rapid movements with the improvement of their 
transport. One must not think of a nomadic stage as a pre- 
decessor of a settled stage in human affairs. To begin with, 
man was a slow drifter, following food. Then one sort of men 
began to settle down, and another sort became more distinctly 
nomadic. The settled sort began to rely more and more upon 
grain for food; the nomad began to make a greater use of milk 
for food. He bred his cows for milk. The two ways of life, 
specialized in opposite directions. It was inevitable that nomad 
folk and the settled folk should clash, that the nomads should 
seem hard barbarians to the settled peoples, and the settled 
peoples soft and effeminate and very good plunder to the nomad 
peoples. Along the fringes of the developing civilizations there 
must have been a constant raiding and bickering between hardy 
nomad tribes and mountain tribes and the more numerous and 
less warlike peoples in the towns and villages. 

For the most part this was a mere raiding of the borders. 
The settled folk had the weight of numbers on their side; the 
herdsmen might raid and loot, but they could not stay. That 
sort of mutual friction might go on for many generations. But 
ever and again we find some leader or some tribe amidst the 
disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful enough to 
force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe be- 
tide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on 
the unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of con- 
quest. Instead of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle 
down on the conquered land, which becomes all booty for them ; 
the villagers and townsmen are reduced to servitude and tribute- 
paying, they become hewers of wood and drawers of water, and 
the leaders of the nomads become kings and princes, masters 
and aristocrats. They, too, settle do\vn, they learn many of the 
arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and 
hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 135 

old nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, 
they drive and race chariots, they regard work, especially agri- 
cultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class. 

This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories 
in history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first 
history that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the 
civilized regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class 
and the working mass of the population. And we find, too, that 
after some generations, the aristocrat, having settled down, be- 
gins to respect the arts and refinements and lawabidingness of 
settlement, and to lose something of his original hardihood. He 
intermarries, he patches up a sort of toleration between con- 
queror and conquered ; he exchanges religious ideas and learns 
the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a 
part of the civilization he has captured. And as he does so, 
events gather towards a fresh invasion by the free adventurers 
of the outer world. 



This alternation of settlement, conquest, refinement, fresh 
conquest, refinement, is particularly to be noted in the region of 
the Euphrates and Tigris, which lay open in every direction to 
great areas which are not arid enough to be complete deserts, 
but which were not fertile enough to support civilized popula- 
tions. Perhaps the earliest people to form real cities in this part 
of the world, or indeed in any part of the world, were a people 
of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They were probably 
brunets of Iberian or Dravidian affinities. They used a kind of 
writing which they scratched upon clay, and their language has 
been deciphered.^ It was a language more like the unclassified 
Caucasic language groups than any others that now exist. These 
languages may be connected with Basque, and may represent 
what was once a widespread primitive language group extend 
ing from Spain and western Europe to eastern India, and reach- 

* Excavations conducted at Eridu by Capt. R. Campbell Thompson during 
the recent war have revealed an early Neolithic agricultural stage, before 
the invention of writing or tlie use of bronze beneath the earliest Sumerian 
foundations. The crops were cut by sickles of earthenware. Capt. Thomp- 
son thinks that these pre-Sumerian people were not of Sumerian race, 
but proto-Elamites. Entirely similar Neolithic remains have been 
found at Susa, once the chief city of Elam. 



136 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



ing southwards to Central Africa. These people shaved their 
heads and wore simple tunic-like garments of wool. They set- 
tled first on the lower courses of the great river and not very 
far from the Persian Gulf, which in those days ran up for a 
hundred and thirty miles ^ and more beyond its present head. 
They fertilized their fields by letting water run through irriga- 
tion trenches, and they gradually became very skilful hydraulic 
engineers ; they had cattle, asses, sheep, and goats, but no horses ; 
their collections of mud huts grew into towns, and their religion 
raised up tower-like temple buildings. 

Clay, dried in the sun, was a very great fact in the lives of 
these people. This lower country of the Euphrates-Tigris val- 




A venj eaxhj Sunurian abotve. carving; skowixuj^ Sumeriaxi warviaca' in. pludazuc 



leys had little or no stone. They built of brick, they made pot- 
tery and earthenware images, and they drew and presently wrote 
upon thin tile-like cakes of clay. They do not seem to have 
had paper or to have used parchment. Their books and mem- 
oranda, even their letters, were potsherds. 

At Nippur they built a great tower of brick to their chief 
god, El-lil (Enlil), the memory of which is supposed to be pre- 
served in the story of the Tower of Babel. They seem to have 
been divided up into city states, which warred among them- 
selves and maintained for many centuries their military ca- 
pacity. Their soldiers can-ied long spears and shields, and 
fought in close formation. Sumerians conquered Sumerians. 
Sumeria remained unconquered by any stranger race for a very 

' Sayce, in Babylonian and Assyrian Life, estimates that in 6,500 B.C. 
Eridu was on the sea-coast. 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 137 

long period of time indeed. They developed their civilization, 
iheir writing, and their shipping, through a period that may be 
twice as long as the whole period from the Christian era to the 
present time. 

The first of all known empires was that founded by the high 
priest of the god of the Sumerian city of Erech. It reached, 
says an inscription at Nippur, from the Lower (Persian Gulf) 
to the Upper (Mediterranean or Red?) Sea. Among the mud 
heaps of the Euphrates-Tigris valley the record of that vast 
period of history, that first half of the Age of Cultivation, is 
buried. There flourished the first temples and the first priest- 
rulers that we know of among mankind. 

§ 2b 

Upon the western edge of this country appeared nomadic 
tribes of Semitic-speaking peoples who traded, raided, and 
fought with the Sumerians for many generations. Then arose 
it last a great leader among these Semites, Sargon (2,750 b.c), 
who united them, and not only conquered the Sumerians, but 
extended his rule from beyond the Persian Gulf on the east 
to the Mediterranean on the west. His own people were called 
the Akkadians and his empire is called the Sumerian Akkadian 
empire. It endured for over two hundred years. 

But though the Semites conquered and gave a king to the 
Sumerian cities, it was the Sumerian civilization which pre- 
vailed over the simpler Semitic culture. The newcomers learnt 
the Sumerian writing (the "cuneiform" writing) and the 
Sumerian language; they set up no Semitic writing of their 
own. The Sumerian language became for tbese barbarians the 
language of knowledge and power, as Latin was the language 
of knowledge and power among the barbaric peoples of the mid- 
dle ages in Europe. This Sumerian learning had a very great 
vitality. It was destined to survive through a long series of 
conquests and changes that now began in the valley of tbe two 
rivers. 

§ 2c 

As the people of the Sumerian Akkadian empire lost their 
political and military vigour, fresh inundations of a warlike 



138 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

people began from the east, the Elamites,^ while from the west 
came the Semitic Amorites, pinching the Simierian Akkadian 
empire between them. The Amorites settled in what was at 
first a small up-river town, named Babylon ; and after a hundred 
years of warfare became masters of all Mesopotamia under a 
great king, Hammurabi (2,100 b.c), who founded the first 
Babylonian empire. 

Again came peace and security and a decline in aggressive 
prowess, and in another hundred years fresh nomads from the 
east were invading Babylonia, bringing with them the horse and 
the war chariot, and setting up their own king in Babylon. . . . 

§ 2d 

Higher up the Tigris, above the clay lands and with easy 
supplies of workable stone, a Semitic people, the Assyrians, 
while the Sumerians were still unconquered by the Semites, were 
settling about a number of cities of which Assur and Nineveh 
were the chief. Their peculiar physiognomy, the long nose and 
thick lips, was very like that of the commoner type of Polish 
Jew to-day. They wore great beards and ringletted long hair, 
tall caps and long robes. They were constantly engaged in 
mutual raiding with the Hittites to the west; they were con- 
quered by Sargon I and became free again ; a certain Tushratta, 
King of Mitanni, to the north-west, captured and held their 
capital, Nineveh, for a time ; they intrigued with Eg)'pt against 
Babylon and were in the pay of Egypt ; they developed the mili- 
tary art to a very high pitch, and became mighty raiders and 
exacters of tribute; and at last, adopting the horse and the 
war chariot, they settled accounts for a time with the Hittites, 
and then, under Tiglath Pileser I, conquered Babylon for them- 
selves (about 1,100 B.C.). But their hold on the lower, older, 
and more civilized land was not secure, and Nineveh, the stone 
city, as distinguished from Babylon, the brick city, remained 
their capital. For many centuries power swayed between Nine- 
veh and Babylon, and sometimes it was an Assyrian and some- 
times a Babylonian who claimed to be "king of the world." 

^ Of unknown language and race, "neither Sumerians nor Semites," 
says Sayce. Their central city was Susa. Their archaeology is still largely 
an unworked mine. They are believed by some, says Sir H. H. Johnston, 
to have been negroid in type. There is a strong negroid strain in the mod- 
ern people of Elam. ' 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 139 

For four centuries Assyria was restrained from expansion 
towards Egypt by a fresh northward thrust and settlement of 
another group of Semitic peoples, the Arameans, whose chief 
city was Damascus, and whose descendants are the Syrians of 
to-day. (There is, wo may note, no connection whatever be- 
tween the words Assyrian and Syrian. It is an accidental 
similarity.) Across these Syrians the Assyrian kings fought 
for power and expansion south-westward. In 745 B.C. 
arose another Tiglath Pileser, 
Tiglath Pileser III, the Tiglath 
Pileser of the Bible. ^ He not 
only directed the transfer of the 
Israelites to Media (the "Lost 
Ten Tribes" whose ultimate fate 
has exercised so many curious 
minds) but he conquered and 
ruled Babylon, so founding what 
historians know as the New 
Assyrian Empire. His son, Shal- 
maneser IV,^ died during the 
siege of Samaria, and was suc- 
ceeded by a usurper, who, no 
doubt to flatter Babylonian sus- 
ceptibilities, took the ancient 
Akkadian Sumerian name of Sar- 
gon, Sargon 11. He seems to have 
armed the Assyrian forces for the 
first time with iron weapons. It 
was probably Sargon II who 

actually carried out the deporta- " '^'a^-^r™ 

tion of the Ten Tribes. ^dasrdusf&cmt^pahct of Saj-gonll 

Such shiftings about of popula- 
tion became a very distinctive part of the political methods 
of the Assyrian new empire. Whole nations who were difficult 
to control in their native country would be shifted en masse 
to unaccustomed regions and amidst strange neighbours, where 
their only hope of survival would lie in obedience to the 
supreme power. 

Sargon's son, Sennacherib, led the Assyrian hosts to the 
borders of Egypt. There Sennacherib's army was smitten by 

* II. Kings, XV. 29, and xvi. 7 et seq. ' II. Kings xvii. 3. 




ixtait xvamar 



140 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

a pestilence, a disaster described in the nineteenth chapter of the 
Second Book of Kings. 

"And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord 
went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred 
fourscore and five thousand : and when they arose early in the 
morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib 
king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt 
at Nineveh." ^ 

Sennacherib's grandson, Assurbanipal (called by the Greeks 
Sardanapalus), did succeed in conquering and for a time hold- 
ing lower Egypt. 



The Assyrian empire lasted only a hundred and fifty years 
after Sargon II. Fresh nomadic Semites coming from the 
south-east, the Chaldeans, assisted by two Aryan-speaking peo- 
ples from the north, the Medes and Persians, combined against 
it, and took Nineveh in 606 b.c. 

The Chaldean Empire, with its capital at Babylon (Second 
Babylonian Empire), lasted under Nebuchadnezzar the Great 
(Nebuchadnezzar II) and his successors until 539 B.C., when it 
collapsed before the attack of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian 
power. . . . 

So the story goes on. In 330 e.g., as we shall tell later in 
some detail, a Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great, is looking 
on the murdered body of the last of the Persian rulers. 

The story of the Tigris and Euphrates civilizations, of which 
Vr-e have given as yet only the bare outline, is a story of con- 
quest following after conquest, and each conquest replaces old 
rulers and ruling classes by new ; races like the Sumerian and 
the Elamite are swallowed up, their languages vanish, they 
interbre<^d and are lost, the Assyrian melts away into Chaldean 
and Syrian, the Hittites become Aryanized and lose distinc- 
tion, the Semites who swallowed up the Sumerians give place to 
Aryan rulers, Medes and Persians appear in the place of the 
Elamites, the Aryan Persian language dominates the empire 
until the Aryan Greek ousts it from official life. Meanwhile 
*To be murdered by his sons. 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 141 

the plough does its work year by year, the harvests are gathered, 
the builders build as they are told, the tradesmen work and 
acquire fresh devices ; the knowledge of writing spreads, novel 
things, the horse and wheeled vehicles and iron, are introduced 
and become part of the permanent inheritance of mankind ; the 
volume of trade upon sea and desert increases, men's ideas 
widen, and knowledge grows. There are set-backs, massacres, 
pestilence ; but the story is, on the whole, one of enlargement. 
For four thousand years this new thing, civilization, which 
had set its root into the soil of the two rivers, grew as a tree 
grows ; now losing a limb, now stripped by a storm, but always 
growing and resuming its growth. After four thousand years 
the warriors and conquerors were still going to and fro over 
this growing thing they did not understand, but men had now 
(330 B.C.) got iron, horses, writing and computation, money, a 
greater variety of foods and textiles, a wider knowledge of their 
world. 

The time that elapsed between the empire of Sargon I and 
the conquest of Babylon by Alexander the Great was as long, 
be it noted, at the least estimate, as the time from Alexander 
the Great to the present day. And before the time of Sargon, 
men had been settled in the Sumerian land, living in towns, 
worshipping in temples, following an orderly Neolithic agri- 
cultural life in an organized community for at least as long 
again. "Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Larsa, have already an im- 
memorial past when first they appear in history." ^ 

One of the most difficult things for both the writer and stu- 
dent of history is to sustain the sense of these time-intervals 
and prevent these ages becoming shortened by perspective in his 
imagination. Half the duration of human civilization and the 
keys to all its chief institutions are to be found before Sargon 
I. Moreover, the reader cannot too often compare the scale 
of the dates in these latter fuller pages of man's history with 
the succession of countless generations to which the time dia- 
grams given on pages 11 and 47, bear witness. 



Parallel with the ancient beginnings of civilization in 
Sumeria, a parallel process was going on in Egypt. It is still 
' Winckler (Craig), History of Babylonia and Assyria. 



142 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 












THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 



143 



a matter of discussion which was the most ancient of these two 
beginnings, or how far they had a common origin or derived 
one from the other. 

The story of the Nile valley from the dawn of its trace- 
able history until the time of Alexander the Great is not very 
dissimilar from that of Babylonia ; but while Babylonia lay 
open on every side to invasion, Egv'pt was protected by desert 
to the west and by desert and sea to 
the east, while to the south she had 
only negro peoples. Consequently 
her history is less broken by the in- 
vasions of strange races than is the 
history of Assyria and Babylon, and 
until towards the eighth century 
B.C., when she fell under an Ethio- 
pian dynasty, whenever a conqueror 
did come into her story, he came in 
from Asia by way of the Isthmus of 
Suez, 

The Stone Age remains in Egypt 
are of very uncertain date ; there are 
Pala?olithic and then Neolithic re- 
mains. It is not certain whether the 
jSTeolithic pastoral people who left 
those remains were the direct ances- 
tors of the later Egyptians. In many 
respects they differed entirely from 
their successors. They buried their 
dead, but before they buried them 
they cut up the bodies and appar- 
ently ate portions of the flesh. They 
seem to have done this out of a feel- 
ing of reverence for the departed; ^"^^^^1!^^ ^^*" 
the dead were "eaten with honour" *"pp*'pt»i33iui5 g 
according to the phrase of Mr. Flinders Petrie. It may have 
been that the survivors hoped to retain thereby some vestige 
of the strength and virtue that had died. Traces of similar 
savage customs have been found in the long barrows that were 
scattered over western Europe before the spreading of the 
Aryan -peoples, and they have pervaded negro Africa, where 
they are only dying out at the present time. 




144 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

About 5,000 B.C., or earlier, the traces of these primitive 
peoples cease, and the true Egyptians appear on the scene. The 
former people were hut builders and at a comparatively low 
stage of Neolithic culture, the latter were already a civilized 
Neolithic people; they used brick and wood buildings instead 
of their predecessors' hovels, and they were working stone. 
Very soon they passed into the Bronze Age. They possessed a 
system of picture writing almost as developed as the con- 
temporary writing of the Sumerians, but quite different in char- 
acter. Possibly there was an irruption from southern Arabia 
by way of Aden, of a fresh people, who came into upper Egypt 
and descended slowly towards the delta of the Nile. Dr. Wallis 
Budge writes of them as "conquerors from the East." But 
their gods and their ways, like their picture writing, were very 
different indeed from the Sumerian. One of the earliest known 
figures of a deity is that of a hippopotamus goddess, and so very 
distinctively African. 

The clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian 
clay, and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they 
early resorted to strips of the pap^a-us reed fastened together, 
from whose name comes our word ''paper." 

The broad outline of the history of Egypt is simpler than 
the history of Mesopotamia. It has long been the custom to 
divide the rulers of Egypt into a succession of Dynasties, and 
in speaking of the periods of Egyptian history it is usual to 
speak of the first, fourth, fourteenth, and so on, Dynasty. The 
Egyptians were ultimately conquered by the Persians after 
their establishment in Babylon, and when finally Egypt fell to 
Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., it was Dynasty XXXI that 
came to an end. In that long history of over 4,000 years, a 
much longer period than that between the career of Alexander 
the Great and the present day, certain broad phases of de- 
velopment may be noted here. There was a phase known as 
the ''old kingdom," which culminated in the IVth Dynasty; 
this Dynasty marks a period of wealth and splendour, and its 
monarchs were obsessed by such a passion for making monu- 
ments for themselves as no men have ever before or since had 
a chance to display and gratify. It was Cheops ^ and Chephren 
and Mycerinus of this IVth Dynasty who raised the vast piles 
of the great and the second and the third pyramids at Gizeh, 
» 3,733 B.C., Wallis Budge. 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 145 

These unmeaning sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible vast- 
ness/ erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely 
begTin, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long 
reigns, and left her wasted as if by a war. 

The story of Egypt from the IVth to the XV th Dynasty is a 
story of conflicts between alternative capitals and competing 
religions, of separations into several kingdoms and reunions. 
It is, so to speak, an internal history. Here we can name only 
one of that long series of Pharaohs, Pepi II, who reigned ninety 
years, the longest reign in history, and left a great abundance 
of inscriptions and buildings. At last there happened to Egypt 
what happened so frequently to the civilizations of Mesopo- 
tamia. Egypt was conquered by nomadic Semites, who founded 
a "shepherd" dynasty, the Hyksos (XVIth), which was finally 
expelled by native Egyptians. This invasion probably hap- 
pened while that first Babylonian Empire which Hammurabi 
founded was flourishing, but the exact correspondences of dates 
between early Egypt and Babylonia are still very doubtful. 
Only after a long period of servitude did a popular uprising 
expel these foreigners again. 

After the war of liberation (circa 1,600 b.c.) there followed a 
period of great prosperity in Egypt, the New Empire. Egypt 
became a great and united military state, and pushed her expedi- 
tions at last as far as the Euphrates, and so the age-long struggle 
between the Egyptian and Babylonian-Assyrian power began. 
For a time Egypt was the ascendant power. Thothmes III ^ 

'The great pyramid is 450 feet high and its side 700 feet long. It is 
calculated (says Wallis Budge) to weigh 4,883,000 tons. All this stone 
was lugged into place chietly by human muscle. 

'There are variants to these names, and to most Egyptian names, for 
few self-respecting Egyptologists will tolerate the spelling of their col- 
leagues. One may find, for instance, Thethmosis, Thoutmosis, Tahutmes, 
Thutmose, or Tethmosis; Amunothph, Amenhotep or Amenothes. A pleas- 
ing variation is to break up the name, as, for instance, Amen Hetep. 
This particular little constellation of variants is given here not only be- 
cause it is amusing, but because it is desirable that the reader should 
know such variations exist. For most names the rule of this book has 
been to follow whatever usage has established itself in English literature, 
regardless of the possible contemporary pronunciation. Amenophis, for 
example, has been so written in English books for two centuries. It 
came into the language by indirect routes, but it is now as fairly estab- 
lished as is Damascus as the English name of a Syrian town. Neverthe- 
less, there are limits to this classicism. The writer, after some vacilla- 
tion, has abandoned Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson in the case of 
"Peisistratus" and "Keltic," which were formerly spelt "Pisistratus" and 
"Celtic." 



146 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and Amenophis III (XVIIIth DjTiasty) ruled from Ethiopia 
to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C. For various 
reasons these names stand out with unusual distinctness in the 
Egyptian record. They were great builders, and left many 
monuments and inscriptions. Amenophis III founded Luxor, 
and added greatly to Karnak. At Tel-el-Amarna a mass of 
letters has been found, the royal correspondence with Babylonian 
and Hittite and other monarchs, including that Tushratta who 
took Nineveh, throwing a flood of light upon the political and 
social affairs of this particular age. Of Amenophis IV we 
shall have more to tell later, but of one, the most extraordinary 
and able of Egyptian monarchs, Queen Hatasu, we have no 
space to tell. She is represented upon her monuments in mas- 
culine garb, and with a long beard as a symbol of wisdom. 

Thereafter there was a brief Syrian conquest of Egypt, a 
series of changing dynasties, among which we may note the 
XlXth, which included Rameses II, a great builder of temples, 
who reigned seventy-seven years (about 1,317 to 1,250 e.g.), 
and who is supposed by some to have been the Pharaoh of 
Moses, and the XXIInd, which included Shishak, who 
plundered Solomon's temple (circa 930 e.g.). An Ethiopian 
conqueror from the Upper Nile founded the XXVth Dynasty, 
a foreign dynasty, which went down (670 e.g.) before the new 
Assyrian Empire created by Tiglath Pileser III, Sargon II, 
and Sennacherib, of which we have already made mention. 

The days of any Egyptian predominance over foreign nations 
were drawing to an end. For a time under Psammetichus I 
of the XXVIth Dynasty (664-610 e.g.) native rule was re- 
stored, and Necho II recovered for a time the old Egyptian 
possessions in Syria up to the Euphrates while the Medes and 
Chaldeans were attacking Xineveh. From those gains Xecho II 
was routed out again after the fall of Xineveh and the Assyrians 
by Nebuchadnezzar II, the great Chaldean king, the Nebuchad- 
nezzar of the Bible. The Jews, who had been the allies of 
Necho II, were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar to 
Babylon. 

When, in the sixth century e.g., Chaldea fell to the Persians, 
Egypt followed suit, a rebellion later made Egypt independent 
once more for sixty years, and in 332 e.g. she welcomed Alex- 
ander the Great as her conqueror, to be ruled thereafter by for- 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 147 

eigners, first by Greeks, then by Romans, then in succession 
by Arabs, Turks, and British, until the present day. 

Such briefly is the history of Egypt from its beginnings ; 
a history first of isolation and then of increasing entanglement 
with the affairs of other nations, as increasing facilities of 
communication drew the peoples of the world into closer and 
closer interaction. 

§ 4 

The history we need to tell here of India is simpler even 
than this brief record of Egypt. The Dravidian peoples in 
the Ganges valley developed upon parallel lines to the Sumerian 
and Egyptian societies. But it is doubtful if they ever got to 
so high a stage of social development ; they have left few monu- 
ments, and they never achieved any form of writing. 

Somewhere about the time of Hammurabi or later, a branch 
of the Aryan-speaking people who then occupied North Persia 
and Afghanistan pushed down the north-west passes into India. 
They conquered their way until they prevailed over all the 
darker populations of North India, and spread their rule or 
influence over the whole peninsula. They never achieved any 
unity in India ; their history is a history of warring .kings and 
republics. 

The Persian empire, in the days of its expansion after the 
capture of Babylon, pushed its boundaries beyond the Indus, 
and later Alexander the Great marched as far as the border of 
the desert that separates the Punjab from the Ganges valley. 
But with this bare statement we will for a time leave the history 
of India. 

§ 5 

Meanwhile, as this triple system of White Man civilization 
developed in India and in the lands about the meeting-places 
of Asia, Africa, and Europe, another and quite distinct civiliza- 
tion was developing and spreading out from the then fertile 
but now dry and desolate valley of the Tarim and from the 
slopes of the Kuen-lun mountains in two directions down the 
course of the Hwang-ho, and later into the valley of the Yang- 
tse-kiang. We know practically nothing as yet of the archseol- 



148 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ogy of China, we do not know anything of the Stone Age in 
that part of the world, and at present our ideas of this early 
civilization are derived from the still very imperfectly ex- 
plored Chinese literature. It has evidently been from the first 
and throughout a Mongolian civilization. Until after the time 
of Alexander the Great there are few traces of any Aryan 
or Semitic, much less of Hamitic influence. All such influ- 
ences were still in another world, separated by mountains, 
deserts, and wild nomadic tribes until that time. The Chinese 
seem to have made their civilization spontaneously and un- 
assisted. Some recent writers suppose indeed a connection with 
ancient Sumeria. Of course both China and Sumeria arose 
on the basis of the almost world-wide early Neolithic culture, 
but the Tarim valley and the lower Euphrates are separated by 
such vast obstacles of mountain and desert as to forbid the idea 
of any migration or interchange of peoples who had once settled 
down. Perhaps the movement from the north met another 
movement of culture coming from the south. 

Though the civilization of China is wholly Mongolian (as 
we have defined Mongolian), it does not follow that the north- 
ern roots are the only ones from which it grew. If it grew 
first in the Tarim valley, then unlike all other civilizationj 
(including the Mexican and Peruvian) it did not grow out 
of the heliolithic culture. We Europeans know very little as 
yet of the ethnology and pre-history of southern China. There 
the Chinese mingle with such kindred peoples as the Siamese 
and Burmese, and seem to bridge over towards the darker 
Dravidian peoples and towards the Malays. It is quite clear 
from the Chinese records that there were southern as well as 
northern beginnings of a civilization, and that the Chinese civ- 
ilization that comes into history 2,000 years b.c. is the result of 
a long process of conflicts, minglings and interchanges between 
a southern and a northern culture of which the southern may 
have been the earlier and more highly developed. The southern 
Chinese perhaps played the role towards the northern Chinese 
that the Hamites or Sumerians played to the Aryan and Semitic 
peoples in the west, or that the settled Dravidians played to- 
wards the Aryans in India. They may have been the first 
agriculturists and the first temple builders. But so little is 
known as yet of this attractive chapter in pre-history, that 
we cannot dwell upon it further here. 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 



149 




150 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The chief foreigners mentioned in the early annals of China 
were a Ural-Altaic people on the north-east frontier, the Huns, 
against whom certain of the earlier emperors made war. 

Chinese history is still very little known to European stu- 
dents, and our accounts of the eaily records ivc rnrticu'arly un- 
satisfactory. About 2,700 to 2,400 b.c. reigned five emperors, 
who seem to have been almost incredibly exemplary beings. 

There follows upon these first five emperors a series of 
dynasties, of which the accounts become more and more exact 
and convincing as they become more recent. China has to 
tell a long history of border warfare and of graver struggles 
between the settled and nomad peoples. To begin with, China, 
like Sumer and like Egypt, was a land of city states. The 
government was at first a government of numerous kings ; they 
became loosely feudal under an emperor, as the Egyptians did ; 
and then later, as with the Egyptians, came a centralizing 
empire. Shang (1,750 to 1,125 b.c.) and Chow (1,125 to 
250 B.C.) are named as being the two great dynasties of the 
feudal period. Bronze vessels of these earlier dynasties, beau- 
tiful, splendid, and with a distinctive style of their own, still 
exist, and there can be no doubt of the existence of a high state 
of culture even before the days of Shang. 

It is perhaps a sense of s^anmetry that made the later his- 
torians of Egypt and China talk of the earlier phases of their 
national history as being under dynasties comparable to the 
dynasties of the later empires, and of such early ''Emperors" 
as Menes (in Egypt) or the First Five Emperors (in China). 
The early dynasties exercised far less centralized powers than 
the later ones. Such unity as China possessed under the Shang 
Dynasty was a religious rather than an effective political union. 
The ''Son of Heaven" offered sacrifices for all the Chinese. 
There was a common script, a common civilization, and a com- 
mon enemy in the Huns of the north-western borders. 

The last of the Shang Dynasty was a cruel and foolish mon- 
arch who burnt himself alive (1,125 b.c.) in his palace after a 
decisive defeat by Wu Wang, the founder of the Chow Dynasty. 
Wu Wang seems to have been helped by allies from among 
the south-western tribes as well as by a popular revolt. 

For a time China remained loosely united under the Chow 
emperors, as loosely united as was Christendom under the popes 
in the Middle Ages ; the Chow emperors had become the tradi- 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 151 

tional high priests of the land in the place of the Shang 
Dynasty and claimed a sort of overlordship in Chinese affairs, 
but gradually the loose ties of usage and sentiment that held 
the empire together lost their hold upon men's minds. Hunnish 
peoples to the north and west took on the Chinese civilization 
without acquiring a sense of its unity. Feudal princes began 
to regard themselves as independent. Mr. Liang-Chi-Chao,^ 
one of the Chinese representatives at the Paris Conference of 
1919, states that between the eighth and fourth centuries b.c. 
"there were in the Ilwang-ho and Yang-tse valleys no less than 
five or six thousand small states with about a dozen powerful 
states dominating over them." The land was subjected to per- 
petual warfare (''Age of Confusion"). In the sixth century 
B.C. the great powers in conflict were Ts'i and Ts'in, which 
were northern Hwang-ho states, and Ch'u, which was a vigorous, 
aggressive power in the Yang-tse valley. A confederation 
against Ch'u laid the foundation for a league that kept the 
peace for a hundred years ; the league subdued and incorporated 
Ch'u and made a general treaty of disarmament. It became 
the foundation of a new pacific empire. 

The knowledge of iron entered China at some unknown date, 
but iron weapons began to be commonly used only about 500 
B.C., that is to say two or three hundred years or more after 
this had become customary in Assyria, Egypt, and Europe. 
Iron was probably introduced from the north into China by the 
Huns. 

The last rulers of the Chow Dynasty were ousted by the 
kings of Ts'in, the latter seized upon the sacred sacrificial 
bronze tripods, and so were able to take over the imperial duty 
of offering sacrifices to Heaven. In this manner was the Ts'in 
Dynasty established. It ruled with far more vigour and effect 
than any previous family. The reign of Shi Hwang-ti (mean- 
ing ''first universal emperor") of this dynasty is usually taken 
to mark the end of feudal and divided China. He seems to 
have played the unifying role in the east that Alexander the 
Great might have played in the west, but he lived longer, and 
the unity he made (or restored) was comparatively permanent, 
while the empire of Alexander the Great fell to pieces, as we 
shall tell, at his death. Shi Hwang-ti, among other feats in the 

' China and the League of Nations, a pamphlet by Mr. Liang-Clii-Chao. 
(Pekin Leader Office.) 



152 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

direction of common effort, organized the building of the Great 
Wall of China against the Huns. A civil war followed close 
upon his reign, and ended in the establishment of the Han 
Dynasty. Under this Han Dynasty the empire grew greatly 
beyond its original two river valleys, the Huns were effectively 
restrained, and the Chinese penetrated westward until they 
began to learn at last of civilized races and civilizations other 
than their own. 

By 100 B.C. the Chinese had heard of India, their power 
had spread across Tibet and into Western Turkestan, and they 
were trading by camel caravans with Persia and the western 
world. So much for the present must suffice for our account of 
China. We shall return to the distinctive characters of its 
civilization later. 



§ 6 

And in these thousands of years during which man was 
making his way step by step from the barbarism of the helio- 
lithic culture to civilization at these old-world centres, what was 
happening in the rest of the world ? To the north of these 
centres, from the Khine to the Pacific, the Nordic and Mon- 
golian peoples, as we have told, were also learning the use 
of metals ; but while the civilizations were settling down these 
men of the great plains were becoming migratory and de- 
veloping from a slow wandering life towards a complete seasonal 
nomadism. To the south of the civilized zone, in central and 
southern Africa, the negro was making a slower progress, and 
that, it would seem, under the stimulus of invasion by whiter 
tribes from the Mediterranean regions, bringing with them 
in succession cultivation and the use of metals. These white 
men came to the black by two routes : across the Sahara to the 
west as Berbers and Tuaregs and the like, to mix with the negro 
and create such quasi-white races as the Fulas ; and also by 
way of the Nile, where the Baganda (= Gandafolk) of Uganda, 
for example, may possibly be of remote white origin. The 
African forests were denser then, and spread eastward and 
northward from the Upper Nile. 

The islands of the East Indies, three thousand years ago, 
were probably still only inhabited here and there by stranded 
patches of Palaeolithic Aust.raloids, who had wandered thither 



THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 153 

in those immemorial ages when there was a nearly complete 
land bridge by way of the East Indies to Australia. The 
islands of Oceania were uninhabited. The spreading of the 
heliolithic peoples by sea-going canoes into the islands of the 
Pacific came much later in the history of man, at earliest a 
thousand years b.c. Still later did they reach Madagascar. 
The beautiy of Kew Zealand also was as yet wasted upon man- 
kind ; its highest living creatures were a great ostrich-like bird, 
the moa, now extinct, and the little kiwi which has feathers 
like coarse hair and the merest rudiments of wings. 

In North America a gi'oup of Mongoloid tribes were now 
cut off altogether from the old world. They were spreading 
slowly southward, hunting the innumerable bison of the 
plains. They had still to learn for themselves the secrets of a 
separate agriculture based on maize, and in South America 
to tame the lama to their service, and so build up in Mexico 
and Peru two civilizations roughly parallel in their nature tc 
that of Sumer, but different in many respects, and later by six 
armadillo, were still living. . . . 

When men reached the southern extremity of America, the 
Megatherium, the giant sloth, and the Glyptodon, the giant 
armadillo, were still living. 

There is a considerable imaginative appeal in the obscure 
story of the early American civilizations. It was largely a 
separate development. Somewhen at last the southward drift 
of the Amerindians must have met and mingled with the east- 
ward, canoe^borne drift of the heliolithic culture. But it was 
the heliolithic culture still at a very lowly stage and probably 
before the use of metals. It has to be noted as evidence of 
this canoe-borne origin of American culture, that elephant- 
headed figures are found in Central American drawings. Amer- 
ican metallurgy may have arisen independently of the old- 
world use of metal, or it may have been brought by these ele- 
phant carvers. These American peoples got to the use of 
bronze and copper, but not to the use of iron; they had gold 
and silver ; and their stonework, their pottery, weaving, and 
dyeing were carried to a very high level. In all these things 
the American product resembles the old-world product generally, 
but always it has characteristics that are distinctive. The 
American civilizations had picture-writing of a primitive sort, 
but it never developed even to the pitch of the earliest Egyptian. 



154 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

hieroglypliics. In Yucatan only was there a kind of script, 
the Maya writing, but it was used simply for keeping a cal- 
endar. In Pern the beginnings of writing were superseded 
by a curious and complicated method of keeping records by 
means of knots tied upon strings of various colours and shapes. 
It is said that even laws and orders could be conveyed by this 
code. These string bundles were called quipus, but though 
quipus are still to be found in collections, the art of reading 
them is altogether lost. The Chinese histories, Mr. L, Y. Chen 
informs us, state that a similar method of record by knots was 
used in China before the invention of writing there. The 
Peruvians also got to making maps and the use of counting- 
frames. ''But with all this there was no means of handing 
on knowledge and experience from one generation to another, 
nor was anything done to fix and summarize these intellectual 
possessions, which are the basis of literature and science." ^ 

When the Spaniards came to America, the Mexicans knew 
nothing of the Peruvians nor the Peruvian^ of the Mexicans. 
Intercourse there was none. Whatever links had ever existed 
were lost and forgotten. The Mexicans had never heard of 
the potato which was a principal article of Peruvian diet. In 
5,000 B.C. the Sumerians and Egyptians probably knew as 
little of one another. American was 6,000 vears behind the 
Old World. 

^F. Ratzel, History of Mankind. 



XV 

SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 

§ 1. The Earliest Ships and Sailors. § 2. The /Egean Cities 
before History. § 3. The First Voyages of Exploration... 
§ 4. Early Traders. § 5. Early Travellers. 



I'^HE first boats were made very early indeed in the Neo- 
lithic stage of culture by riverside and lakeside peoples. 
They were no more than trees and floating wood, used 
to assist the imperfect natural swimming powers of men. Then 
came the hollowing out of the trees, and then, with the de- 
velopment of tools and a primitive carpentry, the building of 
boats. Men in Egypt and Mesopotamia also developed a primi- 
tive type of basketwork boat, caulked with bitumen. Such 
was the "ark of bulrushes" in which Moses was hidden by his 
mother. A kindred sort of vessel grew up by the use of 
skins and hides expanded upon a wicker framework. To this 
day cow-hide wicker boats (coracles) are used upon the west 
coast of Ireland where there is plenty of cattle and a poverty 
of big trees. They are also still used on the Euphrates, and 
on the Towy in South Wales. Inflated skins may have preceded 
the coracle, and are still used on the Euphrates and upper 
Ganges. In the valle^^s of the great rivers, boats must early 
have become an important means of communication; and it 
seems natural to suppose that it was from the mouths of the 
great rivers that man, already in a reasonably seaworthy vessel, 
first ventured out upon what must have seemed to him then 
the trackless and homeless sea. 

No doubt he ventured at first as a fisherman, having learnt 
the elements of seacraft in creeks and lagoons. Men may have 
navigated boats upon the Levantine lake before the refilling 
of the Mediterranean by the Atlantic waters. The canoe was 
an integral part of the heliolithic culture, it drifted with the 

155 



156 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

culture upon the warm waters of the earth from the Mediter- 
ranean to (at last) America. There were not only canoes, but 
Sumerian boats and ships upon the Euphrates and Tigris, when 
these rivers in 7,000 b.c. fell by separate mouths into the 
Persian Gulf. The Sumerian city of Eridu, which stood at the 
head of the Persian Gulf (from which it is now separated by a 
hundred and thirty miles of alluvium ^), had ships upon the sea 
then. We also find evidence of a fully developed sea life six 
thousand years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and 
possibly at that time there were already canoes on the seas 
among the islands of the nearer East Indies. There are pre- 
dynastic Xeolithic Egyptian representations of Nile ships of a 
fair size, capable of carrying elephants.^ 

Very soon the seafaring men must have realized the peculiar 
freedom and opportunities the ship gave them. They could 
get away to islands; no chief nor king could pursue a boat or 
ship with any certainty; every captain was a king. The sea- 
men would find it easy to make nests upon islands and in strong 
positions on the mainland. There they could harbour, there 
they could carry on a certain agriculture and fishery ; but their 
specialty and their main business was^ of course, the expedition 
across the sea. That was not usually a trading expedition; 
it was much more frequently a piratical raid. From what 
we know of mankind, we are bound to conclude that the first 
sailors plundered when they could, and traded when they had to. 

Because it developed in the comparatively warm and tran- 
quil waters of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the 
Persian Gulf, and the western horn of the Indian Ocean, the 
shipping of the ancient world retained throughout certain char- 
acteristics that make it differ very widely from the ocean-going 
sailing shipping, with its vast spread of canvas, of the last four 
hundred years. ''The Mediterranean," says Mr. Torr,^ '4s a 
sea where a vessel with sails may lie becalmed for days to- 
gether, while a vessel with oars would easily be traversing the 
smooth waters, with coasts and islands everywhere at hand 
to give her shelter in case of storm. In that sea, therefore, oars 
became the characteristic instruments of navigation, and the 
arrangement of oars the chief problem in shipbuilding. And 

* Sayce. 

'Mosso, The Daicn of Mediterranean Civilization. — R. L. C. 

'Cecil Torr, Ancient Ships. 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 



157 



so long as the Mediterranean nations dominated Western Eu- 
rope, vessels of the southern type were built upon the northern 
coasts, though there generally was wind 
enough here for sails and too much wave 
for oars. . . . The art of rowing can 
first be discerned upon the Nile. Boats 
with oars are represented in the earliest 
pictorial monuments of Egypt, dating 
from about 2,500 b.c. ; and although 
some crews are paddling with their 
faces towards the bow, others are row- 
ing with their faces towards the stem. 
The paddling is certainly the older 
practice, for the hieroglyph chen depicts 
two arms grasping an oar in the attitude 
of paddling, and the hieroglyphs were 
invented in the earliest ages. And that 
practice may really have ceased before 
2,500 B.C., despite the testimony of 
monuments of that date; for in monu- 
ments dating from about 1,250 B.C., 
crews are represented unmistakably 
rowing with their faces towards the 
stem and yet grasping their oars in the 
attitude of paddling, so that even then 
Egyptian artists mechanically followed 
the turn of the hieroglyph to which 
their hands were accustomed. In these 
reliefs there are twenty rowers on the 
boats on the Nile, and thirty on the 
ships on the Red Sea ; but in the earliest 
reliefs the number varies considerably, 
and seems dependent on the amount of 
space at the sculptor's disposal." 

The Aryan peoples came late to the 
sea. The earliest ships on the sea were 
either Sumerian or Hamitic ; the 
Semitic peoples followed close upon 
these pioneers. Along the eastern end 
of the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, set 
up a string of ipdependent harbour towns of which Acre, 




158 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Tyre, and Sidcn were the chief; and later they pushed their 
voyages westward and founded Carthage and Utica in ISTorth 

Africa, Possibly 
Phoenician keels 
were already in 
the Mediterra- 
nean by 2,000 B.C. 
Both Tyre and 
Sidon were origi- 
nally on islands, 
and so easily de- 
fensible against a 
land raid. But be- 
fore we go on to 
the marine ex- 
ploits of this great 
sea-going race, we 
must note a very 
remarkable and 
curious nest of 
early sea people 
whose remains 
have been discov- 
ered in Crete. 



These early 
Cretans were of a 
race akin to the 
Iberians of Spain 
and Western Eu- 
rope and the dark 
whites of Asia 
Minor and ISTorth 
Africa, and their 
language is un- 
known. This race 
lived not only in 
Sicily, and South 
the 
At 




Crete, but in Cyprus, Greece, Asia Minor 

Italy. It was a civilized people for long ages before 

fair N^ordic Greeks spread southward through Macedonia. 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 159 

Cnossos, in Crete, there have been found the most astonishing 
ruins and remains, and Cnossos, therefoTe, is apt to overshadow 
the rest of these settlements in people's imaginations, but it is 
well to bear in mind that though Cnossos was no doubt a chief 
city of this /Egean civilization, these ''^Egeans" had in the full- 
ness of their time many cities and a wide range. Possibly, all 
that we know of them now are but the vestiges of the far more 
extensive heliolithic Neolithic civilization which is now sub- 
merged under the waters of the Mediterranean. 

At Cnossos there are Neolithic remains as old or older than 
any of the pre-dynastic remains of Egypt. The Bronze Age 
began in Crete as soon as it did in Egypt, and there have been 
vases found by Flinders Petrie in Egypt and referred by 
him to the 1st Dynasty, which he declared to be importations 
from Crete. Stone vessels have been found in Crete of forms 
characteristic of the IVth (pyramid-building) Dynasty, and 
there can be no doubt that there was a vigorous trade between 
Crete and Egypt in the time of the Xllth Dynasty. This con- 
tinued until aijout 1,000 b.c. It is clear that this island civiliza- 
tion arising upon the soil of Crete is at least as old as the 
Egyptian, and that it was already launched upon the sea as 
early as 4,000 b.c. 

The great days of Crete were not so early as this. It was 
only about 2,500 b.c. that the island appears to have been 
unified under one ruler. Then began an age of peace and pros- 
perity unexampled in the history of the ancient world. Secure 
from invasion, living in a delightful climate, trading with every 
civilized community in the world, the Cretans were free to de- 
velop all the arts and amenities of life. This Cnossos was not 
so much a town as the vast palace of the king and his people. 
It was not even fortified. The kings, it would seem, were called 
Minos always, as the kings of Egypt were all called Pharaoh ; 
the king of Cnossos figiires in the early legends of the Greeks 
as King Minos, who lived in the Labyrinth and kept there a 
horrible monster, half man, half bull, the Minotaur, to feed 
which he levied a tribute of youths and maidens from the 
Athenians. Those stories are a part of Greek literature, and 
have always been known, but it is only in the last few decades 
that the excavations at Cnossos have revealed how close these 
legends were to the reality. The Cretan labyrinth was a build- 
ing as stately, complex, and luxurious as any in the ancient 



160 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

world. Among other details we find water-pipes, bathrooms, 
and the like conveniences, such as have hitherto been regarded 
as the latest refinements of modern life. The pottery, the textile 
mannfactiires, the sculpture and painting of these people, their 
gem and ivory work, their metal and inlaid work, is as ad- 
mirable as any that mankind has produced. They were much 
given to festivals and shows, and, in particular, they were 
addicted to bull-fights and gymnastic entertainments. Their 
female costume became astonishingly "modern" in style; their 
women wore corsets and flounced dresses. They had a system 
of writing which has not yet been deciphered. 

It is the custom nowadays to make a sort of wonder of these 
achievements of the Cretans, as though they were a people 
of incredible artistic ability living in the dawn of civilization. 
But their great time was long past that dawn ; as late as 2,000 
B.C. It took them many centuries to reach their best in art 
and skill, and their art and luxury are by no means so great 
a wonder if we reflect that for 3,000 years they were immune 
from invasion, that for a thousand years they were at peace. 
Century after century their artizans could perfect their skill, 
and their men and women refine upon refinement. Wherever 
men of almost any race have been comparatively safe in this 
fashion for such a length of time, they have developed much 
artistic beauty. Given the opportunity, all races are artistic. 
Greek legend has it that it was in Crete that Daedalus at- 
tempted to make the first flying machine. Daedalus (= cunning 
artificer) was a sort of personified summary of mechanical 




CIVILIZATION 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 



161 



skill. It is curious to speculate what germ of fact lies behind 
him and those waxen wings that, according to the legend, melted 
and plunged his son Icarus in the sea. 

There came at last a change in the condition of the lives of 
these Cretans, for other peoples, the Greeks and the Phoenicians, 
were also coming out with powerful fleets upon the seas. We 
do not know what led to the disaster nor who inflicted it; but 
somewhen about 1,400 b.c. Cnossos was sacked and burnt, and 
though the Cretan life 
struggled on there 
rather lamely for an- 
other four centuries, 
there came at last a 
final blow about 1,000 
B.C. (that is to say, in 
the days of the As- 
syrian ascendancy in 
the East). The palace 
at Cnossos was de- 
stroyed, and never re- 
built nor reinhabited. 
Possibly this was done 
by the ships of those 
new-comers into the 
Mediterranean, t h e 
barbaric Greeks, a 
group of Aryan-speak- 
ing tribes from the 
north, who may have 




tJ.V. H. i-oni photos, by 
BriJi^ ■ School at Athens 



Taiezice. R^arc fixmi Cnossos "hr* 

votarx£ or the Snake Ooddass'..... 

wiped out Cnossos as they wiped out the city of Troy. The 
legend of Theseus tells of such a raid. He entered the Laby- 
rinth (which may have been the Cnossos Palace) by the aid of 
Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, and slew the Minotaur. 

The Iliad makes it clear that destruction came upon Troy 
because the Trojans stole Greek women. Modern writers, with 
modern ideas in their heads, have tried to make out that the 
Greeks assailed Troy in order to secure a trade route or some 
such fine-spun commercial advantage. If so, the authors of 
the Iliad hid the motives of their characters very skilfully. 
It would be about as reasonable to say that the Homeric Greeks 
went to war with the Trojans in order to be well ahead with 



162 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

a station on the Berlin to Bagdad railway. The Homeric 
Greeks were a healthy barbaric Aryan people, with very poor 
ideas about trade and "trade routes" ; they went to war with 
the Trojans because they were thoroughly annoyed about this 
stealing of women. It is fairly clear from the Minos legend 
and from the evidence of the Cnossos remains, that the Cretans 
kidnapped or stole youths and maidens to be slaves, bull-fighters, 
athletes, and perhaps sacrifices. They traded fairly w^ith the 
Egyptians, but it may be they did not realize the gathering 
strength of the Greek barbarians ; they ''traded'* violently with 
them, and so brought sword and flame upon themselves. 

Another gi-eat sea people were the Phoenicians. They were 
great seamen because they were great traders. Their colony 
of Carthage (founded before 800 b. c. by Tyre) became at last 
greater than any of the older Phoenician cities, but already 
before 1,500 e.g. both Sidon and Tyre had settlements upon 
the African coast. Carthage was comparatively inaccessible 
to the Assyrian and Bab^donian hosts, and, profiting gi-eatly 
by the long siege of Tyre by JSfebuchadnezzar II, became the 
greatest maritime power the world had hitherto seen. She 
claimed the Western Mediterranean as her own, and seized 
every ship she could catch west of Sardinia. Roman writers 
accuse her of great cruelties. She fought the Greeks for Sicily, 
and later (in the second century B.C.) she fought the. Romans. 
Alexander the Great formed plans for her conquest ; but he 
died, as we shall tell later, before he could carry them out. 



§ 3 

At her zenith Carthage probably had the hitherto unheard-of 
population of a million. This population was largely indus- 
trial, and her woven goods were universally famous. As well 
as a coasting trade, she had a considerable land trade with 
Central Africa,^ and she sold- negro slaves, ivory, metals, 
precious stones and the like, to' all the Mediterranean people ; she 
worked Spanish copper mines, and her ships went out into 

* There were no domesticated camels in Africa until after the Persian 
conquest of Egypt. This must have greatly restricted the desert routes. 
(See Bunbury, History of Anciait Geography, note to Chap. VIII.) But 
the Sahara desert of 3,000 or 2,000 years ago was less parched and 
sterile than it is to-day. From rock engravings we may deduce the theory 
that the desert was crossed from oasis to oasis by riding oxen and by 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 163 

the Atlantic and coasted along Portugal and France northward 
as far as the Cassiterides (the Scilly Isles, or Cornwall, in 
England) to get tin. About 520 b.c. a certain Ilanno made a 
voyage that is still one of the most notable in the world. This 
Ilanno, if we may tnist the Periplus of Hmvno, the Greek trans- 
lation of his account which still survives, followed the African 
coast southward from the Straits of Gibraltar as far as the 
confines of Liberia. He had sixty big ships, and his main 
task was to found or reinforce certain Carthaginian stations 
upon the Morocco coast. Then he pushed southward. He 
founded a settlement in the Kio de Oro (on Kerne or Heme 
Island), and sailed on past the Senegal Kiver. The voyagers 
passed on for seven days beyond the Gambia, and landed at 
last upon some island. This they left in a panic, because, al- 
though the day was silent with the silence of the tropical for- 
ests, at night they heard the sound of flutes, drums, and gongs, 
and the sky was red with the blaze of the bush fires. The 
ccast country for the rest of the voyage was one blaze of fire, 
from the burning of the bush. Streams of fire ran down the 
hills into the sea, and at length a blaze arose so loftily that it 
touched the skies. Three days further brought them to an 
island containing a lake ( ?Sherbro Island). In this lake was 
another island ( ?Macaulay Island), and on this were wild, 
hairy men and women, "whom the interpreters called gorilla." 
The Carthaginians, having caught some of the females of these 
"gorillas" — they were probably chimpanzees — turned back and 
eventually deposited the skins of their captives — who had proved 
impossibly violent guests to entertain on board ship^ — in the 
Temple of Juno. 

A still more wonderful Phoenician sea voyage, long doubted, 
but now supported by some archa?ological evidence, is related 
by Herodotus, who declares that the Pharaoh Kecho of the 
XXVIth Dynasty commissioned some Phoenicians to attempt 
tbe circumnavigation of Africa, and that starting from the 
Gulf of Suez southward, they did finally come back through 

ox-carts: perhaps, also, on horses and asses. The camel as a beast of 
transport was seemingly not introduced into North Africa till the Arab 
invasions of the seventh century a.d. The fossil remains of camels are 
found in Algeria, and wild camels may have lingered in the wastes of the 
Sahara and Somaliland till the domesticated camel was introduced. The 
Nubian wild ass also seems to have extended its range to the Sahara. — 
H. H. J. 



164 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the Mediterranean to the Nile delta. They took nearly three 
years to complete their voyage. Each year they landed, and 
sowed and harvested a crop of wheat before going on. 



§ 4 

The great trading cities of the Phoenicians are the most strik- 
ing of the early manifestations of the peculiar and character- 
istic gift of the Semitic peoples to mankind, trade and exchange.^ 
While the Semitic Phoenician peoples were spreading them- 
selves upon the seas, another kindred Semitic people, the 
Arameans, whose occupation of Damascus we have already 
noted, were developing the caravan routes of the Arabian and 
Persian deserts, and becoming the chief trading people of 
Western Asia. The Semitic peoples, earlier civilized than the 
Aryan, have always shown, and still show to-day, a far greater 
sense of quality and quantity in marketable goods than the 
latter ; it is to their need of account-keeping that the develop- 
ment of alphabetical writing is to be ascribed, and it is to them 
that most of the great advances in computation are due. Our 
modern numerals are Arabic; our arithmetic and algebra are 
essentially Semitic sciences. 

The Semitic peoples, we may point out here, are to this 
day counting peoples strong in their sense of equivalents and 
reparation. The moral teaching of the Hebrews was saturated 
by such ideas. "With what measure ye mete, the same shall 
be meted unto you." Other races and peoples have imagined 
diverse and fitful and marvellous gods, but it was the trad- 
ing Semites who first began to think of God as a Righteous 
Dealer, whose promises were kept, who failed not the humblest 
creditor, and called to account every spurious act. 

The trade that was going on in the ancient world before the 
sixth or seventh century B.C. was almost entirely a barter 
trade. There was little or no credit or coined money. The 
ordinary standard of value with the early Aryans was cattle, 
as it still is with the Zulus and Kaffirs to-day. In the Iliad, 
the respective values of two shields are stated in head of cattle, 
and the Roman word for money^Lj pecunia, is derived from 

^ There was Sumerian trade organized round the temples before the 
Semites got into Babylonia. See Hall and King, Archaological Discoveries 
in Western Asia. — E. B. 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 165 

pecus, cattle. Cattle as money had this advantage; it did not 
need to be carried from one owner to another, and if it needed 
attention and food, at any rate it bred. But it was incon- 
venient for ship or caravan transit. Many other substances 
have at various times been found convenient as a standard ; 
tobacco was once legal tender in the colonial days in North 
America, and in West Africa fines are paid and bargains made 
in bottles of trade gin. The early Asiatic trade included 
metals; and weighed lumps of metal, since they were in gen- 
eral demand and were convenient for hoarding and storage, 
costing nothing for fodder and needing small houseroom, soon 
asserted their superiority over cattle and sheep. Iron, which 
seems to have been first reduced from its ores by the Hittites, 
was, to begin with, a rare and much-desired substance.^ It is 
stated by Aristotle to have supplied the first currency. In 
the collection of letters found at Tel-el-Amarna, addressed to 
and from Amenophis III (already mentioned) and his succes- 
sor Amenophis IV, one from a Hittite king promises iron as 
an extremely valuable gift. Gold, then as now, was the most 
precious, and therefore most portable, security. In early Egypt 
silver was almost as rare as gold until after the XVIIIth 
Dynasty. Later the general standard of value in the Eastern 
world became silver, measured by weight. 

To begin with, metals were handed about in ingots and 
weighed at each transaction. Then they were stamped to 
indicate their fineness and guarantee their purity. The first 
recorded coins were minted about 600 b.c. in Lydia, a gold- 
producing country in the west of Asia Minor. The first-known 
gold coins were minted in Lydia by Croesus, whose name has 
become a proverb for wealth ; he was conquered, as we shall 
tell later, by that same Cyrus the Persian who took Babylon in 
539 B.C. But very probably coined money had been used in 
Babylonia before that time. The "sealed shekel," a stamped 
piece of silver, came very near to being a coin. The promise 
to pay so much silver or gold on "leather" (= parchment) with 
the seal of some established firm is probably as old or older 
than coinage. The Carthaginians used such "leather money." 
We know very little of the way in which small traffic was con- 
ducted. Common people, who in those ancient times were in 

' Iron bars of fixed weight were used for coin in Britain. Caesar, De 
Bello Gallico.—G. Wh. 



166 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

dependent positions, seem to have had no money at all ; they 
did their business by barter. Early Egyptian paintings show 
this going on.^ 



When one realizes the absence of small money or of any 
conveniently portable means of exchange in the pre-Alexandrian 
world, one perceives how impossible was private travel in those 
days.^ The first "inns" — no doubt a sort of caravanserai — are 
commonly said to have come into existence in Lydia in the third 
or fourth century b.c. That, however, is too late a date. They 
are certainly older than that. There is good evidence of them 

least as early as the sixth century. zEschylus twice mentions 

'? 3 



inns. His word is "all-receiver," or "all-receiving h 



g nouse. 

Private travellers must have been fairly common in the Greek 
world, including its colonies, by this time. But such private 
travel was a comparatively new thing then. The early histo- 
rians Hecatseus and Herodotus travelled widely. "I suspect," 
says Professor Gilbert Murray, "that this sort of travel 'for 
Historic' or 'for discovery' was rather a Greek invention. Solon 
is supposed to have practised it; and even Lycurgiis." . . . 
The earlier travellers were traders travelling in a caravan or in 
a shipload, and carrying their goods and their minas and 
shekels of metal or gems or bales of fine stuff with them, or 
government officials travelling with letters of introduction and 
a proper retinue. Possibly there were a few mendicants, and, 
in some restricted regions, religious pilgrims. 

That earlier world before 600 b.c. was one in which a lonely 
"stranger" was a rare and suspected and endangered being. 
He might suffer horrible cruelties, for there was little law to 
protect such as he. Few individuals strayed therefore. One 

* The earliest coinage of the west coast of Asia Minor was in electrum, 
a mixture of gold and silver, and there is an interesting controversy as to 
whether the first issues were stamped by cities, temples, or private bank- 
ers.— P. G. 

^ Small change was in existence before the time of Alexander. The 
Athenians had a range of exceedingly small silver coins running almost 
down to the size of a pinhead which were generally carried in the mouth; 
a character in Aristophanes was suddenly assaulted, and swallowed his 
change in consequence. — P. G. 

^ There is an inn-keeper in Aristophanes, but it may be inferred from 
the circumstance that she is represented as letting lodgings in hell, that 
the earlv inn left much to be desired. — P. G. 



SEA PEOPLES AND TRADING PEOPLES 167 

lived and died attached and tied to some patriarchal tribe, 
if one was a nomad, or to some great household if one was 
civilized or to one of the big temple establishments which we 
will presently discuss. Or one was a herded slave. One knew 
nothing, except for a few monstrous legends, of the rest of the 
world in which one lived. We know more to-day, indeed, of 
the world of COO b.c. than any single living being knew 
at that time. We map it out, see it as a whole in relation to 
past and future. We begin to learn precisely what was going 
on at the same time in Egypt and Spain and Media and India 
and China. We can share in imagination, not only the won- 
der of Hanno's sailors, but of the men who lit the warning 
beacons on the shore. We know that those "mountains flam- 
ing to the sky" were only the customary burning of the dry 
grass at that season of the year. Year by year, more and more 
rapidly, our common knowledge increases. In the years to 
como men will understand still more of those lives in the past, 
until perhaps they will imderstand them altogether. 



XVI 

WRITING 

§ 1. Pidure-Writing. § 2. Syllable-Writing. § 3. Alpha- 
bet-Writing. § 4. The Place of Wnting in Human Life. 

§ 1 

IN" the four preceding chapters (XII to XV) we have 
sketched in broad outline the development of the chief 
human communities from the primitive beginnings of the 
heliolithic culture to the great historical kingdoms and empires 
in the sixth century B.C. We must now study a little more closely 
the general process of social change, the growth of human ideas, 
and the elaboration of human relationships that was going on 
during these ages between 10,000 b.c. and 500 b.c. What we 
have done so far is to draw the map and name the chief kings 
and empires, to "define the relations in time and space of 
Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia, Cnossos, and the like; 
we come now to the real business of history, which is to get down 
below these outer forms to the thoughts and lives of individual 
men. 

By far the most important thing that was going on during 
those fifty or sixty centuries of social development was the 
invention of writing and its gradual progress to importance in 
human affairs. It was a new instrument for the human mind, 
an enormous enlargement of its range of action, a new means 
of continuity. We have seen how in later Pala?olithic and early 
Neolithic times the elaboration of articulate speech gave men 
a mental handhold for consecutive thought, and a vast en- 
largement of their powers of co-operation. For a time this new 
acquirement seems to have overshadowed their earlier achieve- 
ment of drawing, and possibly it checked the use of gesture. 
But drawing presently reappeared again, for record, for signs, 
for the joy of drawing. Before real writing came picture- 
writing, such as is still practised by the Amerindians, the Bush- 

168 



WRITING 169 

men, and savage and barbaric people in all parts of the world. 
It is essentially a drawing of things and acts, helped out by 
heraldic indications of proper names, and by strokes and dots 
to represent days and distances and snch-like quantitative ideas. 

Quite kindred to such picture-writing is the pictograph that 
one finds still in use to-day in international railway time-tables 
upon the continent of Europe, where a little black sign of a 
cup indicates a stand-up buifet for light refreshments ; a crossed 
knife and fork, a restaurant; a little steamboat, a transfer to 
a steamboat ; and a postilion's horn, a diligence. Similar signs 
are used in the well-known Michelin guides for automobilists 
in Europe, to show a postoflfice (envelope) or a telephone (tele- 
phone receiver). The quality of hotels is shown by an inn 
with one, two, three, or four gables, and so forth. Similarly, 
the roads of Europe are marked with wayside signs represent- 
ing a gate, to indicate a level crossing ahead, a sinuous bend 
for a dangerous cui-ve, and the like. From such pictographic 
signs to the first elements of Chinese writing is not a very long 
stretch. 

In Chinese writing there are still traceable a number of picto- 
graphs. Most are now difficult to recognize. A mouth was 
originally written as a mouth-shaped hole, and is now, for 
convenience of brushwork, squared ; a child, originally a rec- 
ognizable little mannikin, is now a hasty wriggle and a cross ; 
the sun, originally a large circle with a dot in the centre, has 
been converted, for the sake of convenience of combination, into 
a crossed oblong, which is easier to make with a brush. By 
combining these pictogTaphs, a second order of ideas is ex- 
pressed. For example, the pictograph for mouth combined 
with pictograph for vapour expressed "words." ^ 

Fj'om such combinations one passes to what are called ideo- 
grams: the sign for "words" and the sign for "tongue" combine 
to make "speech" ; the sign for "roof" and the sign for "pig" 
make "home" — for in the early domestic economy of China the 
pig was as important as it used to be in Ireland. But, as we 
have already noted earlier, the Chinese language consists of a 
comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which are 
all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon 
discovered that a number of these pictographs and ideographs 
could be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently 
'See the Encyclopaedia Brit., Article China, p. 218. 



170 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

pictured, but having the same sound. Characters so used are 
called phonograms. For example, the sound fang meant not 
only "boat," but "a place," "spinning," "fragrant," "inquire," 
and several other meanings according to the context. But while 
a boat is easy to draw, most of the other meanings are undraw- 
able. How can one draw "fragrant" or "inquire" ? The 
Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings 
of "fang," but added to each of them another distinctive sign, 
the determinative, to show what sort of fang was intended. A 
"place" was indicated by the same sign as for "boat" {fang) 
and the determinative sign for "earth" ; "spinning" by the sign 
for fang and the sign for "silk" ; "inquire" by the sign for fang, 
and the sign for "words," and so on. 

One may perhaps make this development of pictographs, ideo- 
grams, and phonograms a little clearer by taking an analogous 
case in English. Suppose we were making up a sort of picture- 
writing in English, then it would be very natural to use a square 
with a slanting line to suggest a lid, for the word and thing 
hex. That would be a pictogi-aph. But now^ suppose we had a 
round sign for money, and suppose w^e put this sign inside the 
box sign, that would do for "cash-box" or "treasury." That 
would be an ideogram. But the word "box" is used for other 
things than boxes. , There is the box shrub which gives us box- 
wood. It would be hard to draw a recognizable box-tree dis- 
tinct from other trees, but it is quite easy to put our sign "box," 
and add our sign for shrub as a determinative to determine that 
it is that sort of box and not a common box that we want to 
express. And then there is "box," the verb, meaning to fight 
w'ith fists. Here, again, w^e need a determinative; we might 
add the two crossed swords, a sign which is used very often 
upon maps to denote a battle. A box at a theatre needs yet an- 
other determinative, and so we go on, through a long series of 
phonograms. 

Now it is manifest that here in the Chinese writing is a very 
peculiar and complex system of sign-writing. A very great 
number of characters have to be learnt and the mind habituated 
to their use. The power it possesses to carry ideas and discus- 
sion is still ungauged by western standards, but we may doubt 
whether with this instrument it will ever be possible to establish 
such a wide, common mentality as the simpler and swifter 
alphabets of the western civilizations permit. In China it 



WRITING 



171 



created a special reading-class, the mandarins, who were also 
the ruling and official class. Their necessary concentration 
upon words and classical forms, rather than upon ideas and 
realities, seems, in 
spite of her com- 
parative peaceful- 
ness and the very 
high individual in- 
tellectual quality 
of her people, to 
have greatly ham- 
pered the social 
and economic de- 
V e 1 p m e n t of 
China. Probably 
it is the complex- 
ity of her speech 
and writing, more 
than any other 
imaginable cause, 
that has made 
China to-day po- 
litically, socially, 
and individually a 
vast pool of back- 
ward people rather 
than the foremost 
power in the whole 
world. -^ 




Specimens of Amcricaiz IiidUn plciurc-iirribxic^ 

(dtW ScKoolci'afL.) 
Xo. 1, painted on a rock on the shore of Lake 
Superior, records an expedition across the lake, in 
which five canoes took part. The upright strokes 
in each indicate the nuniher of the crew, and the 
bird represents a chief, "The Kingfisher." The 
three circles (suns) vinder the arch (of heaven) 
indicate that the voyage lasted three days, and the 
tortoise, a symbol of land, denotes a safe arrival. 
No. 2 is a petition sent to the United States Con- 
gress by a group of Indian tribes, asking for fish- 
ing rights in certain small lakes. The tribes are 
represented by their totems, martens, bear, man- 
fish, and catfish, led by the crane. Lines running 
from the heart and eye' of each animal to the heart 
and eye of the crane denote that they are all of 
one mind; and a line runs from the eye of the 
crane to the lakes, shown in the crude little "map" 
in the lower left-hand corner. 



§ 2 

But while the 
Chinese mind thus 
made for itself an 
instrument which 

^The writer's friend, Mr. L. Y. Chen, thinks that this is only partially 
true. He thinks that the emperors insisted upon a minute and rigorous 
study of the set classics in order to check intellectual innovation. This 
was especially the case with the Ming emperors, the first of whom, when 
reorganizing the examination system on a narrower basis, said definitely, 
"This will bring all the intellectuals of the world into my trap." The 
Five Classics and the Four Books have imprisoned the mind of China. 



172 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

is probably too elaborate in structure, too laborious in use, and 
too inflexible in its form to meet the modern need for simple, 
swift, exact, and lucid communications, the gi'owing civiliza- 
'ons of the west were working out the problem of a 
'*ten record upon rather different and, on the whole, more 
■•tageous lines. They did not seek to improve their scrip*^ 
^ it swift and easy, but circumstances conspired to make 
""he Sumerian picture writing, which had to be done 
M^ and with little styles, which made curved marks 

wit. V and inaccurately, rapidly degenerated by a con- 

ventK 'abbing down of wedged-shaped marks (cunei- 

form — Saped) into almost unrecognizable hints of the 

shapes in It helped the Sumerians greatly to learn to 

write, that ^ to draw so badly. They got very soon 

to the Chine. -aphs, ideographs, and phonograms, and 

beyond them. ^ 

Most people ki. of puzzle called a rebus. It is a way 

of representing wo .y "pictures, not of the things the words 
represent, but by tht pictures of other things having a similar 
sound. For example, two gates and a head is a rebus for Gates- 
head; a little streamlet (beck), a crowned monarch, and a hani, 
Beckingham. The Sumerian language was a language well 
adapted to this sort of representation. It was apparently a 
language of often quite vast polysyllables, made up of very dis- 
tinct inalterable syllables; and many of the syllables taken 
separately were the names of concrete things. So that this 
cuneiform writing developed very readily into a syllabic way 
of writing, in which each sign conveys a syllable just as each 
act in a charade conveys a syllable. When presently the Semites 
conquered Sumeria, they adapted the syllabic system to their 
own speech, and so this writing became entirely a sign-for-a- 
sound writing. It was so used by the Assyrians and by the 
Chaldeans, But it was not a letter-writing, it was a syllable- 
writing. This cuneiform script prevailed for long ages over 
Assyria, Babylonia, and the Near East generally; there are 
vestiges of it in some of the letters of our alphabet to-day. 



But, meanwhile, in Egj'pt and upon the Mediterranean coast 
yet another system of writing grew up. Its beginnings are 



WRITING 173 

probably to be found in the priestly picture-writinoj (hiero- 
glyphics) of the Egyptians, which also in the usual way became 
partly a sound-sia-n system. As we see it on the Egyptian 
monuments, the hieroglyphic writing consists of decorative but 
stiff and elaborate forms, but for such purpose as letter-writing 
and the keeping of recipes and the like, the Egyptian priests 
used a much simplified and flowing form of these characters, 
the hieratic script. Side by side with this hieratic script rose 
another, probably also derivative from the hieroglyphs, a script 
now lost to use, which was taken over by various non-Egyptian 
peoples in the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, Libyans, 
Lydians, Cretans, and Celt-Iberians, and used for business pur- 
poses. Possibly a few letters were borrowed from the later 
cuneiform. In the hands of these foreigners this writing was, 
so to speak, cut off from its roots ; it lost all but a few traces 
of its early pictorial character. It oeased to be pictographic 
or ideographic ; it became simply a pure sound-sign system, an 
alphabet. 

There were a number of such alphabets in the Mediterranean 
differing widely from each other. It may be noted that the 
Phoenician alphabet (and perhaps others) omitted vowels. 
Possibly they pronounced their consonants very hard and had 
rather indeterminate vowels, as is said to be still the case with 
tribes of South Arabia. Quite probably, too, the Phoenicians 
used their alphabet at first not so much for writing as for single 
initial letters in their business accounts and tallies. One of 
these Mediterranean alphabets reached the Greeks, long after 
the time of the Iliad, who presently set to work to make it 
express the clear and beautiful sounds of their own highly 
developed Aryan speech. It consisted at first of consonants, 
and the Greeks added the vowels. They began to write for 
record, to help and fix their bardic tradition. . . . 



So it was by a series of very natural steps that writing grew 
out of the life of man. At first and for long ages it was the 
interest and the secret of only a few people in a special class, 
a mere accessory to the record of pictures. But there were cer- 
tain very manifest advantages, quite apart from the increased 
expressiveness of mood and qualification, to be gained by making 



174 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

writing a little less plain tlian straightforward pictures, and in 
conventionalizing and codifying it. One of these was that so 
messages might be sent imderstandable by the sender and re- 
ceiver, but not plain to the uninitiated. Another was that so 
one might put down various matters and help one's memory and 
the memory of one's friends, without giving away too much 
to the common herd. Among some of the earliest Egyptian 
writings, for example, are medical recipes and magic formulae. 
Accounts, letters, recipes, narhe lists, itineraries; these were 
the earliest of written documents. Then, as the art of writing 
and reading spread, came that odd desire, that pathetic desire 
so common among human beings, to astonish some strange and 
remote person by writing down something striking, some secret 
one knew, seme strange thought, or even one's name, so that 
long after one had gone one's way^ it might strike upon the 
sight and mind of another reader. Even in Sumeria men 
scratched on walls, and all that remains to us of the ancient 
world, its rocks, its buildings, is plastered thickly with the 
names and the boasting of those foremost among human adver- 
tisers, its kings. Perhaps half the early inscriptions in that 
ancient world are of this nature, if, that is, we group with the 
name-writing and boasting the epitaphs, which were probably 
in many cases pre-arranged by the deceased. 

For long the desire for crude self-assertion of the name- 
scrawling sort and the love of secret understandings kept writ- 
ing within a narrow scope ; but that other, more truly social 
desire in men, the desire to tell, was also at work. The pro- 
founder possibilities of writing, the possibilities of a vast exten- 
sion and definition and settlement of knowledge and tradition, 
only grew apparent after long ages. But it will be interesting 
at this point and in this connection to recapitulate certain ele- 
mental facts about life, upon which we laid stress in our earlier 
chapters, because they illuminate not only the huge value of 
writmg in the whole field of man's history, but also the role 
it is likely to play in his future. 

1. Life had at first, it must be remembered, only a discon- 
tinuous repetition of consciousness, as the old died and the 
young were born. 

Such a creature as a reptile has in its brain a capacity for 
experience, but when the individual dies, its experience dies 
with it. Most of its motives are purely instinctive, and all 



WRITING 175 

the mental life that it has is the result of heredity (birth 
inheritance). 

2. But ordinary mammals have added to pure instinct tradi- 
tion, a tradition of experience imparted by the imitated ex- 
ample of the mother, and in the case of such mentally developed 
animals as dogs, cats, or apes, by a sort of mute precept also. 
For example, the mother cat chastises her young for misbe- 
haviour. So do mother apes and baboons. 

3. Primitive man added to his powers of transmitting ex- 
perience, representative art and speech. Pictorial and sculp- 
tured record and verbal tradition began. 

Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by 
the bards. They did much to make language what it is to the 
world to-day, 

4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of 
pictorial record, human tradition was able to become fuller and 
much more exact. Verbal tradition, which had hitherto 
changed from age to age, began to be fixed. Men separated by 
hundreds of miles could now communicate their thoughts. An 
increasing number of human beings began to share a common 
written knowledge and a common sense of a past and a future. 
Human thinking became a larger operation in which hundreds 
of minds in different places and in different ages could react 
upon one another ; it became a process constantly more con- 
tinuous and sustained. . . . 

5. For hundreds of generations the full power of writing 
was not revealed to the world, because for a long time the idea 
of multiplying writings by taking prints of a first copy did not 
become effective. The only way of multiplying writings was 
by copying one copy at a time, and this made books costly and 
rare. Moreover, the tendency to keep things secret, to make a 
cult and mystery of them, and so to gain an advantage over the 
generality of men, has always been very strong in men's minds. 
It is only nowadays that the great masses of mankind are learn- 
ing to read, and reaching out towards the treasures of knowledge 
and thought already stored in books. 

Nevertheless, from the first writings onward a new sort of 
tradition, an enduring and immortal tradition, began in the 
minds of men. Life, through mankind, grew thereafter more 
and more distinctly conscious of itself and its world. It is a 
thin streak of intellectual growth we trace in history, at first in 



176 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

a world of tumultuous ignorance and forgetfulness ; it is like a 
mere line of light coming through the chink of an opening door 
into a darkened room; but slowly it widens, it grows. At last 
came a time in the history of Europe when the door, at the push 
of the printer, began to open more rapidly. Knowledge flared 
up, and as it flared it ceased to be the privilege of a favoured 
minority. For us now that door swings wider, and the light 
behind grows brighter. Misty it is still, glowing through clouds 
of dust and reek. 

The door is not half open; the light is but a light new lit. 
Our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge. 



XVII 

GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS ATvTD KINGS 

§ 1. The Priest Comes into History. § 2. Priests and the 
Stars. § 3. Priests and the Dawn of Learning. § 4. King 
against Priest. § 5. TIoiv Bel-Marchik Struggled against the 
Kings. § 6. The God-Kings of Egypt. § 7. Shi Ihvang-ti 
Destroys the Books. 

§ ^- 

WHEN we direct onr attention to these new accumula- 
tions of human beings that were beginning in Egypt 
and Mesopotamia, we find that one of the most con- 
spicuous and constant objects in all these cities is a temple or 
a group of temples. In some cases there arises beside it in 
these regions a royal palace, but as often the temple towers over 
the palace. This presence of the temple is equally true of the 
Phoenician cities and of the Greek and Roman as they arise. 
The palace of Cnossos, with its signs of comfort and pleasure- 
seeking, and the kindred cities of the ^gean peoples, include 
religious shrines, but in Crete there are also temples standing 
apart from the palatial city-households. All over the ancient 
civilized world we find them ; wherever primitive civilization 
set its foot in Africa, Europe, or western Asia, a temple arose, 
and where the civilization is most ancient, in Egypt and in 
Sumer, there the temple is most in evidence. When Hanno 
reached what he thought was the most westerly point of Africa, 
he set up a temple to Hercules. The beginnings of civilization 
and the appearance of temples is simultaneous in history. The 
two things belong together. The beginning of cities is the 
temple stage of history. 

In all these temples there was a shrine ; dominating the 
shrine there was commonly a gi'eat figiire usually of some 
monstrous half-animal form, before which stood an altar for 
sacrifices. In the Greek and Roman temples however the image 
was generally that of a divinity in human form. This figure 

177 



178 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

was either regarded as the god or as the image or symbol of the 
god, for whose worship the temple existed. And conuected 
with the temple there were a number, and often a considerable 
number, of priests or priestesses, and temple servants, generally 
wearing a distinctive costume and forming an important part 
of the city population. They l^elong to no household; they 
made up a new kind of household of their own. They were 
a caste and a class apart, attracting intelligent recruits from 
the general population. 

The primary duty of this priesthood was concerned with the 
worship of and the sacrifices to the god of the temple. And 
these things were done, not at any time, but at particular times 
and seasons. There had come into the life of man with his 
herding and agriculture a sense of a difference between the 
parts of the year and of a difference between day and day. Men 
were beginning to work — and to need days of rest. The temple, 
by its festivals, kept count. The temple in the ancient city was 
like the clock and calendar upon a writing-desk. 

But it was a centre of other functions. It was in the early 
temples that the records and tallies of events were kept and 
that writing began. And there was knowledge there. The 
people went to the temple not only en masse for festivals, but 
individually for help. The early priests were also doctors and 
magicians. In the earliest temples we already find those little 
offerings for some private and particular end, which are still 
made in the chapels of Catholic churches to-day, ex vofos, little 
models of hearts relieved and limbs restored, acknowledgment 
of prayers answered and accepted vows. 

It is clear that here we have that comparatively unimportant 
element in the life of the early nomad, the medicine-man, the 
shrine-keeper, and the memorist, developed, with the develop- 
ment of the community and as a part of the development of the 
community from barbarism to civilized settlement, into some- 
thing of very much greater importance. And it is equally evi- 
dent that those primitive fears of (and hopes of help from) 
strange beings, the desire to propitiate unknown forces, the 
primitive desire for cleansing and the primitive craving for 
power and knowledge have all contributed to erystallli2;e out this 
new social fact of the temple. ■' ' 

The temple was accumulated by complex necessities, it grew 
from many roots and needs, and the god or goddess that domi- 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 179 




180 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

nated the temple was the creation of many imaginations and 
made up of all sorts of impulses, ideas, and half ideas. Here 
tJiere was a god in which one sort of ideas predominated, and 
there another. It is necessary to lay some stress upon this 
confusion and variety of origin in gods, because there is a very 
abundant literature now in existence upon religious origins, 
in which a number of writers insist, some on this leading idea 
and some on that — we have noted several in our chapter on 
^'Early Thought" — as though it were the only idea. Professor 
Max Miiller in his time, for example, harped perpetually on 
the idea of sun stories and sun worship. He would have had 
us think that early man never had lusts or fears, cravings for 
power, nightmares or fantasies, but that he meditated per- 
petually on the beneficent source of light and life in the sky. 
Now dawn and sunset are very moving facts in the daily life, 
but they are only two among many. Early men, three or four 
hundred generations ago, had brains very like our own. The 
fancies of our childhood and youth are perhaps the best clue 
we have to the ground-stuff of early religion, and anyone who 
can recall those early mental experiences will understand very 
easily the vagueness, the monstrosity, and the incoherent variety 
of the first gods. There were sun gods, no doubt, early in the 
history of temples, but there were also hippopotamus gods and 
hawk gods; there were cow deities, there were monstrous male 
and female gods, there were gods of terror and gods of an ador- 
able quaintness, there were gods who were nothing but lumps 
of meteoric stone that had fallen amazingly out of the sky, and 
gods who were mere natural stones that had chanced to have 
a queer and impressive shape. Some gods, like Marduk of 
Babylon and the Baal (= the Lord) of the Phoenicians, 
Canaanites, and the like, were quite probably at bottom just 
legendary wonder beings, such as little boys will invent for 
themselves to-day. The settled peoples, it is said, as soon as 
they thought of a god, invented a wife for him; most of the 
Egyptian and Babylonian gods were married. But the gods 
of the nomadic Semites had not this marrying disposition. 
Children were less eagerly sought by the inhabitants of the food- 
grudging steppes. 

Even more natural than to provide a wife for a god is to 
give him a house to live in to which oiferings can be brought. 
Of this house the knowing man, the magician, would naturally 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 181 

become the custodian. A certain seclusion, a certain aloofness, 
would add greatly to the prestige of the god. The steps by 
which the early temple and the early priesthood developed so 
soon as an agricultural population settled and increased are all 
qnite natural and understandable, up to the stage of the long 
I cm pie with the image, shrine and altar at one end and the 
long nave in which the worshippers stood. And this temple,^ 
because it had records and secrets, because it was a centre of 
power, advice, and instruction, because it sought and attracted 
imaginative and clever people for its service, naturally became 
a kind of brain in the growing community. The attitude of 
the common people who tilled the fields and herded the beasts 
towards the temple would remain simple and credulous. There, 
rarely seen and so imaginatively enhanced, lived the god whose 
approval gave prosperity, whose anger meant misfortune; he 
could be propitiated by little presents and the help of his 
servants could be obtained. He was wonderful, and of such 
power and knowledge that it did not do to be disrespectful to 
him even in one's thoughts. Within the priesthood, however, a 
certain amount of thinking went on at a rather higher level 
than that. 



We may note here a very interesting fact about the chief 
temples of Egypt and, so far as we know — because the ruins are 
not so distinct — of Babylonia, and that is that they were 
"oriented"- — that is to say, that the same sort of temple was 
built so that the shrine and entrance always faced in the same 
direction. In Babylonian temples this was most often due 
east, facing the sunrise on March 21st and September 21st, 
the equinoxes ; and it is to be noted that it was at the spring 
equinox that the Euphrates and Tigris came down in flood. 
The Pyramids of Gizeh are also oriented east and west, and 
the Sphinx faces due east, but very many of the Egyptian 
temples to the south of the delta of the Nile do not point due 
east, but to the point where the sun rises at the longest day — 
and in Egypt the inundation comes close to that date. Others, 
however, pointed nearly northward, and others again pointed 
to the rising of the star Sirius or to»the rising-point of other 
conspicuous stars. The fact of orientation links up with the 



182 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 183 

fact that there early arose a close association between various 
gods and the sun and various fixed stars. Whatever the mass 
of people outside were thinking, the priests of the temples were 
beginning to link the movements of those heavenly bodies with 
the power in the shrine. They were thinking about the gods 
they served and thinking new meanings intq^them. They were 
brooding upon the mystery ' of" tlVe stars. It was very natural 
for them to suppose that these shining bodies, so irregularly 
distributed and circling so solemnly and silently, must be 
charged with portents to mankind. 

Among other things, this orientation of the temples served 
to fix and help the great annual festival of the New Year. On 
one morning in the year, and one morning alone, in a temple 
oriented to the rising-place of the sun at Midsummer Day, the 
sun's first rays would smite down through the gloom of the 
temple and the long alley of the temple pillars, and light up 
the god above the altar and irradiate him with glory. The 
narrow, darkened structure of the ancient temples seems to 
be deliberately planned for such an effect. No doubt the people 
were gathered in the darkness before the dawn ; in the darkness 
there was chanting and perhaps the offering of sacrifices; the 
god alone stood mute and invisible. Prayers and invocations 
would be made. Then upon the eyes of the worshippers, 
sensitized by the darkness, as the sun rose behind them, the 
god would suddenly shine. 

So, at least, one explanation of orientation is found by such 
students of orientation as Sir Norman Lockyer.^ Not only is 
orientation apparent in most of the temples of Egypt, Assyria, 
Babylonia, and the east, it is found in the Greek temples; 
Stonehenge is oriented to the midsummer sunrise, and so are 
most of the megalithic circles of Europe ; the Altar of Heaven 
in Peking is oriented to midwinter. In the days of the Chinese 
Empire, up to a few years ago one of the most important of 
all the duties of the Emperor of China was to sacrifice and pray 
in this temple upon midwinter's day for a propitious year. 

The Egyptian priests had mapped out the stars into the 
constellations, and divided up the zodiac into twelve signs by 
3,000 B.C. . . . 

*In his Dawn of Astronomy. 



184 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



This clear evidence of astronomical inquiry and of a develop- 
ment of astronomical ideas is the most obvious, but only the 
most obvious evidence of the very considerable intellectual 
activities that went on within the temple precincts in ancient 
times. There is a curious disposition among many modern 
writers to deprecate priesthoods and to speak of priests as though 
they had always been impostors and tricksters, preying upon the 
simplicity of mankind. But, indeed, they were for long the 
only writing class, the only reading public, the only learned 
and the* only thinkers ; they were all the professional classes of 
the time. You could have no intellectual life at all, you could 
not get access to literature or any knowledge except through 
the priesthood. The temples were not only observatories and 
libraries and clinics, they were museums and treasure-houses. 
The original Periplus of Hanno hung in one temple in Car- 
thage, skins of his "gorillas" were hung and treasured in an- 
other. Whatever there was of abiding worth in the life of 
the community sheltered there. Herodotus, the early Greek 
historian (485-425 b.c), collected most of his material from 
the priests of the countries in which he travelled, and it is 
evident they met him generously and put their very considerable 
resources completely at his disposal. Outside the temples the 
world was still a world of blankly illiterate and unspeculative 
human beings, living from day to day entirely for themselves. 
Moreover, there is little evidence that the commonalty felt 
cheated by the priests, or had anything but trust and affection 
for the early priesthoods. Even the great conquerors of later 
times were anxious to keep themselves upon the right side of 
the priests of the nations and cities whose obedience they de- 
sired, because of the immense popular influence of these priests. 

No doubt there were great differences between temple and 
temple and cult and cult in the spirit and quality of the priest- 
hood. Some probably were cruel, some vicious and greedy, 
many dull and doctrinaire, stupid with tradition, but it has to 
be kept in mind that there were distinct limits to the degeneracy 
or inefficiency of a priesthood. It had to keep its grip upon 
the general mind. It could not go beyond what people would 
stand — either towards the darkness or towards the light. ^ Its 
authority rested, in the end, on the persuasion that its activities 
were propitious. 



\, 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 185 



The earliest civilized governments were essentially priestly 
governments. It was not kings and captains who first set men 
to the plough and a settled life. It was the ideas of the gods 
and plenty, working with the acquiescence of common men. 
The early rulers of Sumer we know were all priests, kings 
only because they were chief priests. And priestly government 
had its own weaknesses as well as its peculiar deep-rooted 
strength. The power of a priesthood is a power over their own 
people alone. It is a subjugation through mysteritrns-fears and 
hopes. The priesthood can gatlier its people together for war, 
but its traditionalism and all its methods unfit it for military 
control. Against the enemy without, a priest-led people is feeble. 

Moreover, a priest is a man vow-ed, trained, and consecrated, 
a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an 
intense esprit de corps. He has given np his life to his temple 
and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal 
vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives or dies 
for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or 
village is another temple with another god. It is his constant 
preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults 
and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they 
will overcome, but they will never coalesce. Our first percep- 
tions of events in Sumer, in the dim uncertain light before 
history began, is of priests and gods in conflict; until the 
Sumerians were conquered by the Semites they were never 
united ; and the same incurable conflict of priesthoods scars all 
the temple ruins of Egypt. It was impossible that it could 
have been otherwise, having regard to the elements out of which 
religion arose. 

It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods, 
namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their 
inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power 
of secular kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed 
and set up a king over the people, or the priesthoods who would 
not give way to each other set np a common fighting captain, 
who retained more or less power in peace time. This secular 
king developed a gronp of officials about him and began, in 
relation to military organization, to take a share in the priestly 
administration of the people's affairs. So, growing out of 
priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of 



186 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the priest, appears upon the stage of human history, and a 
very large amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind 
is only to be understood as an elaboration, complication, and 




^n ^ssifvimi Kin^ S his Chief T^/finister 

distortion of the struggle, unconscious or deliberate, between 
these two systems of human control, the temple and the palace. 
And it was in the original ' centres of civilization that this 
antagonism was most completely developed. The barbaric 
Aryan peoples, who became ultimately the masters of all the 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 187 

ancient civilizations of the Orient and of the western world, 
never passed through a phase of temple rule on their way to 
civilization; they came to civilization late; they found that 
drama already half-played. They took over the ideas of both 
temple and kingship, when those ideas were already elaborately 
developed, from the more civilized Hamitic or Semitic people 
they conquered. 

The greater importance of the gods and the priests in the 
earlier history of the Mesopotamian civilization is very appar- 
ent, but gradually the palace wen its way until it was at last 
in a position to struggle definitely for the supreme power. At 
first, in the story, the palace is ignorant and friendless in the 
face of the temple ; the priests alone read, the priests alone know 
the people are afraid of them. But in the dissensions of the 
various cults comes the opportunity of the palace. From other 
cities, from among captives, from defeated or suppressed re- 
ligious cults, the palace gets men who also can read and who 
can do magic things.^ The court also becomes a centre of 
writing and record; the king thinks for himself and becomes 
politic. Traders and foreigners drift to the court, and if the 
king has not the full records and the finished scholarship of the 
priests, he has a wider and fresher first-hand knowledge of 
many things. The priest comes into the temple when he is 
very young ; he passes many years as a neophyte ; the path of 
learning the clumsy letters of primitive times is slow and toil- 
some; he becomes erudite and prejudiced rather than a man of 
the world. Some of the more active-minded young priests may 
even cast envious eyes at the king's service. There are many 
complications and variations in this ages-long drama of the 
struggle going on beneath the outward conflicts of priest and 
king, between the made man and the born man, between learn- 
ing and originality, between established knowledge and settled 
usage on the one hand, and creative will and imagination on 
the other. It is not always, as we shall find later, the priest 
who is the conservative and unimaginative antagonist. Some- 
times a king struggles against narrow and obstructive priest- 
hoods; sometimes priesthoods uphold the standards of civiliza- 
tion against savage, egotistical, or reactionary kings. 

* Cp. Moses and the Egyptian Magicians. 



188 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

One or two outstanding- facts and incidents of the early stages 
of tliis fundamental struggle in political affairs are all that we 
can note here between 4,000 b.c. and the days of Alexander. 

§ 5 

In the early days of Sumeria and Akkadia the city-kings 
were priests and medicine-men rather than kings, and it was 
only when foreign conquerors sought to establish their hold in 
relation to existing institutions that the distinction of priest and 
king became definite. But the god of the priests remained as 
the real overlord of the land and of priest and king alike. He 
was the universal landlord ; the wealth and authority of his 
temples and establishments outshone those of the king. Espe- 
cially was this the case within the city walls. Hammurabi, the 
founder of the first Babylonian empire, is one of the earlier 
monarchs whom we find taking a firm grip upon the affairs of 
the community. He does it with the utmost politeness to the 
gods. In an inscription recording his irrigation work in 
Sumeria and Akkadia, he begins: "When Anu and Bel en- 
trusted me with the rule of Sumer and Akkad ." We 

possess a code of laws made by this same Hammurabi — it is 
the earliest known code of law — and at the head of this code 
we see the figure of Hammurabi receiving the law from its 
nominal promulgator, the god Shamash. 

An act of great political importance in the conquest of any 
city was the carrying off of its god to become a subordinate in 
the temple of its conqueror. This was far more important than 
the subjugation of king by king. Merodach, the Babylonian 
Jupiter, was carried off by the Elamites, and Babylon 
did not feel independent until its return. But sometimes a 
conqueror was afraid of the god he had conquered. In the col- 
lection of letters addressed to Amenophis III and lY at Tel- 
Amarna in Egypt, to which allusion has already been made, 
is one from a certain king, Titshratta, King of Mitanni, who 
has conquered Assyria and taken the statue of the goddess 
Ishtar. Apparently he has sent this statue into Egypt, partly 
to acknowledge the overlordship of Amenophis, but partly be- 
cause he fears her anger. (Winckler.) In the Bible is related 
(Sam. i. V. 1) how the Ark of the Covenant of the God of the 
Hebrews was carried off by the Philistines, as a token of con- 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 189 

quest, into the temple of the fish god, Dagon, at Ashdod, and 
how Dagon fell down and was broken, and how the people of 
Ashdod were smitten with disease. In the latter story par- 
ticularly, the gods and priests fill the scene; there is no king in 
evidence at all. 

Right through the history of the Babylonian and Assyrian 
empires no monarch seems to have felt his tenure of power 
secure in Babylon until he had ''taken the hand of Bel" — ■ 
that is to say, that he had been adopted by the priesthood of 
"Bel" as the god's son and representative. As our knowledge 
of Assyrian and Babylonian history grows clearer, it becomes 
plainer that the politics of that world, the revolutions, usurpa- 
tions, changes of dynasty, intrigues with foreign powers, turned 
largely upon issues between the great wealthy priesthoods and 
the growing but still inadequate power of the monarchy. The 
king relied on his army, and this was usually a mercenary army 
of foreigners, speedily mutinous if there was no pay or plunder, 
and easily bribed. We have already noted the name of Sen- 
nacherib, 1he son of Sargon II, among the monarchs of the 
Assyrian empire. Sennacherib was involved in a violent quar- 
rel with the priesthood of Babylon; he never ''took the hand of 
Bel" ; and finally stnick at that power by destroying altogether 
the holy part of the city of Babylon (691 b.c.) and removing 
the statue of Bel-Marduk to Assyria. He was assassinated by 
one of his sons, and his successor, Esar-haddon (his son, but 
not the son who was his assassin), found it expedient to restore 
Bal-Marduk and rebuild his temple, and make his peace with 
the god. 

Assurbanipal (Greek, Sardanapalus), the son of this Esar- 
haddon, is a particularly interesting figiire from this point of 
view of the relationship of priesthood and king. His father's 
reconciliation with the priests of Bel-Marduk went so far that 
Sardanapalus was given a Babylonian instead of a military 
Assyrian education. He became a great collector of the clay 
documents of the past, and his library, which has been un- 
earthed, is now the most precious source of historical material 
in the world. But for all his learning he kept his grip on the 
Assyrian army ; he made a temporary conquest of Egypt, sup- 
pressed a rebellion in Babylon, and carried out a number of 
successful expeditions. As we have already told in Chapter 
XIV, he was almost the last 'of the Assyrian monarchs. The 



190 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Aryan tribes, wlio knew more of war than of priestcraft, and 
particularly the Scythians, the Medes and Persians, had long 
been pressing upon Assyria from the north and north-east. 
The Medes and Persians formed an alliance with the nomadic 
Semitic Chaldeans of the south for the joint undoing of Assyria. 
Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, fell to these Aryans in 606 B.C. 
Sixty-seven years after the taking of Nineveh by the Aryans, 
which left Babylonia to the Semitic Chaldeans, the last mon- 
arch of the Chal- 
dean Empire (the 
Second Babylonian 
Empire) , Naboni- 
dus, the father of 
Belshazzar, was 
overthrown by Cy- 
rus, the Persian. 
This Nabonidus, 
again, was a highly 
educated monarch, 
who brought far too 
much intelligence 
and imagination 
and not enough of 
the short range wis- 
dom of this world to 
affairs of state. He 
conducted antiqua- 
rian researches, and 
to his researches it 
is that we owe the date of 3,750 B.C., assigiied to Sargon I 
and still accepted by many authorities. He was proud of this 
determination^ and left inscriptions to record it. It is clear he 
was a religious innovator ; he built and rearranged temples and 
attempted to centralize religion in Babylon by bringing a num- 
ber of local gods to the temple of Bel-Marduk. No doubt he 
realized the weakness and disunion of his empire due to these 
conflicting cults, and had some conception of unification in 
his mind. 

Events were marching too rapidly for any such development. 
His innovation had manifestly raised the suspicion and hos- 
tility of the priesthood of Bel. They sided with the Persians. 




GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 191 

"The soldiers of Cyrus entered Babylon without fighting." 
Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and Persian sentinels were set 
at the gates of the temple of Bel, "where the services continued 
without intermission." 

Cyrus did, in fact, set up the Persian Empire in Babylon 
with the blessing of Bel-Marduk. He gratified the conservative 
instincts of the priests by packing off the local gods back to 
their ancestral temples. He also restored the Jews to Jerusa- 
lem.^ These were merely matters of immediate policy to him. 
But in bringing in the irreligious Aryans, the ancient priest- 
hood was paying too highly for the continuation of its temple 
services. It would have been wiser to have dealt with the inno- 
vations of ISTabonidus, that earnest heretic, to have listened 
to his ideas, and to have met the needs of a changing world. 
Cyrus entered Babylon 539 B.C. ; by 521 B.C. Babylon was in 
insurrection again, and in 520 b.c. another Persian monarch, 
Darius, was pulling down her walls. Within two hundred 
years the life had altogether gone out of those venerable rituals 
of Bel-Marduk, and the temple of Bel-Marduk was being used 
by builders as a quarry. 



The story of priest and king in Egypt is similar to, but by 
no means parallel with, that of Babylonia. The kings of 
Sumeria and Assyria were priests who had become kings ; they 
were secularized priests. The Pharaoh of Egypt does not ap- 
pear to have followed precisely that line. Already in the very 
oldest records the Pharaoh has a power, and importance ex- 
ceeding that of any priest. He is, in fact, a god, and more 
than either priest or king. We do not know how he got to 
that position. No monarch of Sumeria or Babylonia or Assyria 
could have induced his people to do for him what the great 
pyramid-building Pharaohs of the IVth Dynasty made their 
people do in those vast erections. The earlier Pharaohs were 
not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant god. 
The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of 
Chephren. So late a monarch as Eameses III (XlXth 
Dynasty) is represented upon his sarcophagus (now at Cam- 

^See the last two verses of the Second Book of Chronicles, and Ezra, 
ch. i. 



11)2 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



bridge) bearing the distinctive symbols of the three great gods 
of the Egyptian system. He carries the two sceptres of Osiris, 
the god of Day and Eesnrrection ; npon his head are the horns 
of the cow goddess Hathor, and also the sun ball and feathers 

of Ammon Ra. He 
is not merely 
wearing the sym- 
bols of these gods 
as a devout Baby- 
lonian might wear 
the symbols of Bei- 
M a r d u k ; he is 
these three gods in 
one. 

We find also a 
number of sculp- 
tures and paintings 
to enforce the idea 
that the Pharaohs 
were the actual 
sons of gods. The 
divine fathering 
and birth of Ame- 
nophis III, for in- 
stance (oft he 
XVIIIth Dynas- 
ty), is displayed 
i n extraordinary 
detail in a series 
of sculptures at 
Luxor. Moreover, 
it was held that 
the Pharaohs, be- 
ing of so divine a 
strain, could not 
marry common 
clay, and consequently they were accustomed to marry blood 
relations within the degrees of consanguinity now prohibited, 
even marrying their sisters. 

The struggle between palace and temple came into Egyptian 
history, therefore, at a different angle fr m that at which it came 




Hzincs-cs' UT 
as- Osiris' — 
bchvccn iiia 
a^oclAcsscs' 
K[cphtlu£S- 
smJ, Isis... 



"RclicP on. -die cover- of the ssLTCO'pha^nis- (sit' 
Camhridgc). 'Tiftcr- Shjarpc. 

Inscription (round the edges of cover) as far as 
decipherable: — 

"Osiris, King of Upper and Lowei- Egypt, lord 
of the two conntries . . . son of tlie Sun, beloved 
of the gods, lord of diadems, Rameses, prince of 
Heliopolis, triumphant! Thou art in the condi- 
tion of a god, thou shalt arise as Usr, there is no 
enemy to tliee, I give to thee triumph among 
them. . . ." Budge, Catalogtie. Egj/ptian Collec- 
tion, Filzicilliam Museum, Cambridge. 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 11)3 

into Babylonia. Nevertheless, it came in. Professor Maspero 
(in his New Light on Ancient Egypt) gives a very interesting 
account of the struggle of Amenopliis IV with the priesthoods, 
and particularly with priests of the great god, Amnion Ra, Lord 
of Karnak. The mother of Amenophis IV was not of the race 
of Pharaoh ; it would seem that his father, Amenophis III, 
made a love match with a subject, a beautiful Syrian named 
Tii, and Professor Maspero finds in the possible opposition to 
and annoyance of this queen by the priests of Ammon Ra the 
beginnings of the quarrel. She may, he thinks, have inspired 
her son with a fanatical hatred of Ammon Ra. But Amenophis 
IV may have had a wider view. Like the Babylonian Nabo- 
nidus, who lived a thousand years later, he may have had in 
mind the problem of moral unity in his empire. We have al- 
ready noted that Amenophis III ruled from Ethiopia to the 
Euphrates, and that the store of letters to himself and his 
son found at Tel-Amarna show a very wide range of interest and 
influence. At any rate, Amenophis IV set himself to close all 
the Egyptian and Syrian temples, to put an end to all sectarian 
worship throughout his dominions, and to establish everywhere 
the worship of one god, Aton, the solar disk. He left his capital, 
Thebes, which was even more the city of Ammon Ra than later 
Babylon was the city of Bel-Marduk, and set up his capital 
Pit Tel-Amarna ; he altered his name from "Amenophis," which 
consecrated him to Ammon (Amen) to "Akhnaton," the Sun's 
Glory; and he held his own against all the priesthoods of his 
empire for eighteen years and died a Pharaoh. 

Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very 
widely. There are those who regard him as the creature of his 
mother's hatred of Ammon and the uxorious spouse of a beauti- 
ful wife. Certainly he loved his wife very passionately; he 
showed her great honour — Egypt honoured women, and was 
ruled at different times by several queens — and he was sculp- 
tured in one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and 
in another in the act of kissing her in a chariot ; but men who 
live under the sway of their womenkind do not sustain great 
empires in the face of the bitter hostility of the most influential 
organized bodies in their realm. Others write of him as a 
"gloomy fanatic." Matrimonial bliss is rare in the cases of 
gloomy fanatics. It is much more reasonable to regard him 
as the Pharaoh who refused to be a god. It is not simply his 



194. 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



religious policy and his frank display of natural affection that 
seem to mark a strong and very original personality. His 
aesthetic ideas were his own. lie refused to have his portrait 
conventionalized into the customary smooth beauty of the 
Pharaoh god, and his face looks out at us across an interval of 

thirty-four centu- 
ries, a man amidst 
ranks of divine in- 
sipidities. 

A reign of eigh- 
teen years was not 
long enough for 
the revolution he 
contemplated, and 
his son-in-law who 
succeeded him 
went back to 
Thebes and made 
his peace with 
Amnion Ra. 

To the very end 
of the story the di- 
vinity of kings 
haunted the Egyp- 
tian mind, and in- 
fected the thoughts 
of intellectually 
healthier races. 
When Alexander 
the Great reached 
___^ Babylon, the pres- 
tige of Bel-Marduk 
was already far gone in decay, but in Egypt, Ammon Ra was 
still god enough to make a snob of the conquering Grecian. 
The priests of Ammon Ra, about the time of the XVIIIth or 
XlXth Dynasty (circa 1,400 b.c), had set up in an oasis of 
the desert a temple and oracle. Here was an image of the god 
which could speak, move its head, and accept or reject scrolls 
of inquiry. This oracle was still flourishing in 332 b.c. The 
young master of the world, it is related, made a special journey 
to visit it ; he came into the sanctuary, and the image advanced 




[ba^sed on, ihz cast a± Cairo , & the reliefs in the. 
Berlin MusczmxJ 



GODS AND STARS, PRIESTS AND KINGS 195 

out of the darkness at the back to meet him. There was an 
impressive exchange of salutations. Some such formula as this 
must have been used (says Professor Maspero) : "Come, son 
of my loins, v^^ho loves me so that I give thee the royalty of 
Ra and the royalty of Ilorus ! I give thee valiance, I give 
thee to hold all countries and all religions under thy feet; I give 
thee to strike all the peoples united together with thy arm!" 
So it was that the priests of Egypt conquered their conqueror, 
and an Aryan monarch first became a god. 



The struggle of priest and king in China cannot be discussed 
here at any length. It was different again, as in Egypt it was 
different from Babylonia, but we find the same effort on the 
part of the ruler to break up tradition because it divides up the 
people. The Chinese Emperor, the "Son of Heaven," was 
himself a high-priest, and his chief duty was sacrificial ; in the 
more disorderly phases of Chinese history he ceases to rule and 
continues only to sacrifice. The literary class was detached 
from the priestly class at an early date. It became a bureau- 
cratic body serving the local kings and rulers. That is a funda- 
mental difference between the history of China and any Western 
history. While Alexander was overrunning Western Asia, 
China, under the last priest-emperors of the Chow Dynasty, was 
sinking into a state of great disorder. Each province clung to 
its separate nationality and traditions, and the Huns spread 
from province to province. The King of T'sin (who lived about 
eighty years after Alexander the Great) , impressed by the mis- 
chief tradition was doing in the land, resolved to destroy the 
entire Chinese literature, and his son, Shi Hwang-ti, the "first 
universal Emperor," made a strenuous attempt to seek out and 
destroy all the existing classics. They vanished while he ruled, 
and he ruled without tradition, and welded China into a unity 
that endured for some centuries ; but when he had passed, the 
hidden books crept out again. China remained united, though 
not under his descendants, but after a civil war under a fresh 
dynasty, the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.). The first Han mon- 
arch did not sustain this campaign of Shi Hwang-ti against the 
literati, and his successor made his peace with them and restored 
the texts of the classics. 



XVIII 

SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES, AND FREE 
INDIVIDUALS 

1. The Common Man in Ancient Times. § 2. The Earliest 
Slaves. § 3. The First "Independent" Persons. § 4. So- 
cial Classes Three Thousand Years Ago. § 5. Classes Hard- 
ening info Castes. § 6. Caste in India. § 7. The System 
of the Mandarins. % ^. A Summary of Five Thousand 
Years. 



WE have been sketching in the last four chapters the 
growth of civilized states out of the primitive Neolithic 
agriculture that began in Mesopotamia perhaps 15,000 
years ago. It v^^as at first horticulture rather than agriculture ; 
it was done with the hoe before the plough, and at first it was 
quite supplementary to the sheep, goat, and cattle tending that 
made the "living" of the family tribe. We have traced the broad 
outlines of the development in regions of exceptional fruitful- 
ness of the first settled village communities into more populous 
towns and cities, and the growth of the village shrine and the 
village medicine-man into the city temple and the city priest- 
hord. We have noted the beginnings of organized war, first as 
a flickering between villages, and then as a more disciplined 
struggle between the priest-king and god of one city and those 
of another. Our story has passed on rapidly from the first 
indications of conquest and empire in Sumer, 6,000 or 7,000 
B.C., to the spectacle of great empires growing up, with roads 
and armies, with inscriptions and written documents, with edu- 
cated priesthoods and kings and rulers sustained by a tradition 
already ancient. We have traced in broad outline the appear- 
ance and conflicts and replacements of these empires of the 
great rivers. We have directed attention, in particular, to the 
evidence of a development of still wider political ideas as we 

196 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 197 

find it betrayed by the actions and utterances of such men as 
ISTabonidus and Ameuophis IV. It has been an outline of the 
accumulations of human experience for ten or fifteen thousand 
years, a vast space of time in comparison with all subsequent 
history, but a brief period when we measure it asjainst the suc- 
cession of endless generations that intervenes between us and the 
first rude flint-using human creatures of the Pleistocene dawn. 
But for these last four chapters we have been writing almost 
entirely not about mankind generally, but only about the men 
who thought, the men who could draw and read and write, the 
men who were altering their world. Beneath their activities 
what was the life of the mute multitude ? 

The life of the common man was, of course, affected and 
changed by these things, just as the lives of the domestic animals 
and the face of the cultivated country were changed ; but for the 
most part it was a change suffered and not a change in which 
the common man upon the land had any voice or will. Reading 
and writing were not yet for the likes of him. He went on 
cultivating his patch, loving his wife and children, beating his 
dog and tending his beasts, grumbling at hard times, fearing 
the magic of the priests and the power of the gods, desiring 
little more except to be left alone by the powers above him. So 
he was in 10,000 b.c. ; so he was, unchanged in nature and out- 
look, in the time of Alexander the Great ; so over the greater 
part of the world he remains to-day. He got rather better tools, 
better seeds, better methods, a slightly sounder house, he sold 
his produce in a more organized market as civilization pro- 
gressed. A certain freedom and a certain equality passed out 
of human life when men ceased to wander. Men paid in liberty 
for safety, shelter, and regiilar meals. By imperceptible der 
grees the common man found the patch he cultivated was not 
his own ; it belonged to vhe god ; and he had to pay a fraction 
of his produce to the god. Or the god had given it to the king, 
who exacted his rent and tax. Or the king had given it to an 
official, who was the lord of the common man. And sometimes 
the god or the king or the noble had work to be done, and then 
the common man had to leave his patch and work for his master. 

How far the patch he cultivated was his own was never very 
clear to him. In ancient Assyria the land seems to have been 
held as a sort of freehold and the occupier paid taxes ; in Baby- 
lonia the land was the god's, and he permitted the cultivator to 



198 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

work thereon. In Egypt the temples or Pharaoh-the-god or the 
nobles under Pharaoh were the owners and rent receivers. But 
the cultivator was not a slave ; he was a peasant, and only bound 
to the land in so far that there was nothing else for him to do 
but cultivate, and nowhere else for him to go. He lived in a 
village or town, and went out to his work. The village, to begin 
with, was often merely a big household of related people under 
a patriarch headman, the early town a group of householders 
under its elders. There was no process of enslavement as 
civilization gi-ew, but the headmen and leaderly men grew 
in power and authority, and the common men did not keep 
pace with them, and fell into a tradition of dependence and 
subordination. 

On the whole, the common men were probably well content 
to live under lord or king or god and obey their bidding. It 
was safer. It was easier. All animals — and man is no excep- 
tion—begin life as dependents. Most men never shake them- 
selves loose from the desire for leading and protection.^ 

§ 2 

The earlier wars did not involve remote or prolonged cam- 
paigns, and they were waged by levies of the common people. 
But war brought in a new source of possessions, plunder, and a 
new social factor, the captive. In the earlier, simpler days of 
war, the captive man was kept only to be tortured or sacrificed 
to the victorious god ; the captive women and children were 
assimilated into the tribe. But later many captives were spared 
to be slaves because they had exceptional gifts or peculiar arts. 
It would be the kings and captains who would take these slaves 
at first, and it would speedily become apparent to them that 
these men were much more their own than were the peasant 
cultivators and common men of their own race. The slave could 
be commanded to do all sorts of things for his master that the 
quasi-free common man would not do so willingly because of 
his attachment to his own patch of cultivation. From a very 
early period the artificer was often a household slave, and the 

^ There were literary expressions of social discontent in Egypt before 
2,000 B.C. See "(Social Forces and Religion" in Breasted's Religion and 
Thought in Ancient Egypt for some of the earliest complaints of the com- 
mon man under the ancient civilizations. 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 



199 



manufacture of trade goods, pottery, textiles, metal ware, and 
so forth, such as went on vigorously in the household city of the 
Minos of Cnossos, was probably a slave industry from the be- 
ginning. Sayce, in his Babylonians and Assyrians, quotes 
Babylonian agreements for the teaching of trades to slaves, and 
dealing with the exploitation of slave products. Slaves pro- 
duced slave children, enslavement in discharge of debts added 
to tlie slave population ; it is probable that as the cities grew 
larger, a larger part of the new population consisted of these 
slave artificers and slave servants in the large households. They 
were by no means abject slaves; in later Babylon their lives 
and property were protected by elaborate laws, l^or were 




S^ptimi peasants seized, tor nan- pair meat of taxes'... (^Pip-aniid A^c) 



they all outlanders. Parents might sell their children into 
slavery, and brothers their orphan sisters. Free men who had 
no means of livelihood would even sell themselves into slavery. 
And slavery was the fate of the insolvent debtor. Craft ap- 
prenticeship, again, was a sort of fixed-term slavery. Out of 
the slave population, by a converse process, arose the freed-man 
and f reed-woman, who worked for wages and had still more 
definite individual rights. Since in Babylon slaves could them- 
selves own property, many slaves saved up and bought 
themselves. Probably the tc/wn slave was often better off and 
practically as free as the cultivator of the soil, and as the rural 
population increased, its sons and daughters came to mix with 
and swell the growing ranks of artificers, some bound, some 
free. 

As the extent and complexity of government increased, the 
number of households multiplied. Under the king's household 
grew up the households of his great ministers and officials, under 



200 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the temple grew up the personal households of temple func- 
tionaries; it is not difficult to realize how houses and patches 
of land would become more and more distinctly the property 
of the occupiers, and more and more definitely alienated from 
the original owner-god. The earlier empires in Egypt and 
China both passed into a feudal stage, in which families, origi- 
nally official, became for a time independent noble families. In 
the later stages of Babylonian civilization we find an increasing 
propertied class of people appearing in the social structure, 
neither slaves nor peasants nor priests nor officials, but widows 
and descendants of such people, or successful traders and the 
like, and all masterless folk. Traders came in from the out- 
side. Babylon was full of Aramean traders, who had great 
establishments, with slaves, freed-men, employees of all sorts. 
Their book-keeping was a serious undertaking. It involved 
storing a great multitude of earthenware tablets in huge earthen- 
ware jars.) Upon this gathering mixture of more or less free 
and detached people would live other people, traders, merchants, 
small dealers, catering for their needs. Sayce (op. cit.) gives 
the particulars of an agreement for the setting up and stocking 
of a tavern and beerhouse, for example. The passer-by, the man 
who happened to be about, had come into existence. 

But another and far less kindly sort of slavery also arose in 
the old civilization, and that w-as gang slavery. If it did not 
figure very largely in the cities, it was very much in evidence 
elsewhere. The king was, to begin with, the chief entrepreneur. 
He made the canals and organized the irrigation (e.g. Ham- 
murabi's enterprises noted in the previous chapter). He ex- 
ploited mines. He seems (at Cnossos, e.g.) to have organized 
manufactures for export. The Pharaohs of tlie 1st Dynasty 
w^ere already working the copper and turquoise mines in the 
peninsula of Sinai. For many such purposes gangs of captives 
were cheaper and far more controllable than levies of the king's 
own people. From an early period, too, captives may have 
tugged the oars of the galleys, though Torr {Ancient Ships) 
notes that up to the age of Pericles (450 b.c.) the free Athenians 
were not above this task. And the monarch also found slaves 
convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted 
men ; they did not fret to go home, because they had no homes 
to go to. The Pharaohs hunted slaves in Nubia, in order to 
have black troops for their Syrian expeditions. Closely allied 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 201 

to such slave troops were the mercenary barbaric troops the 
monarchs caught into their service, not by positive compulsion, 
but by the bribes of food and plunder and under the pressure 
of need. As the old civilization developed, these mercenary 
armies replaced the national levies of the old order more and 
more, and servile gang labour became a mere and more impor- 
tant and significant factor in the economic system. From mines 
and canal and wall building, the servile gang spread into culti- 



^^-^i 


^ 


r^^Kf' 


"Tlk/yKj^^^ 


W^W' 


(CLM^P^Pm'^^ 


S^^P=^K 


j^^ 


d^^^^ 





Brawl among hoatxncn... (Frotn. -tomb of Ptah-KcbSp — • — ^Pip-axnid A^c)« 

vation. Nobles and temples adopted the gang-slave system for 
their works. Plantation gangs began to oust the patch cultiva- 
tion of the labourer-serf in the case of some staple products. . . . 

§ 3 

So, in a few paragraphs, we trace the development of the 
simple social structure of the early Sumerian .cities to the com- 
plex city crowds, the multitude of individuals varying in race, 
tradition, education, and function, varying in wealth, free- 
dom, authority, and usefulness, in the great cities of the last 
thousand years b.c. The most notable thing of all is the gradual 
increase amidst this heterogeneous multitude of what we may 
call free individuals, detached persons who are neither priests, 
nor kings, nor officials, nor serfs, nor slaves, who are under 
no great pressure to work, who have time to read and inquire. 
They appear side by side with the development of social security 
and private property. Coined money and monetary reckoning 
developed. The operations of the Arameans and such-like 
Semitic trading people led to the organization of credit and 
monetary security. In the earlier days almost the only prop- 
erty, except a few movables, consisted of rights in land and in 



262 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

houses; later, one could deposit and lend securities, could go 
away and return to find one's property faithfully held and 
secure. Towards the middle of the period of the Persian Em- 
pire there lived one free individual, Herodotus, who has a i>Teat 
interest for us because he was among the first writers of critical 
and intelligent history, as distingiushed from a mere priestly 
or court chronicle. It is worth while to glance here very briefly 
at the circumstances of his life. Later on we shall quote from 
his history. 

We have already noted the conquest of Babylonia by the 
Aryan Persians imder Cyrus in 539 b.c. We have noted, 
further, that the Persian Empire spread into Egypt, where its 
hold was precarious; and it extended also over Asia Minor. 
Herodotus was born about 484 b.c. in a Greek city of Asia 
Minor, Halicarnassus, which was under the overlcrdship of the 
Persians, and directly under the rule of a political boss or 
tyrant. There is no sign that he was obliged either to work 
for a living or spend very much time in the administration of 
his property. We do not know the particulars of his affairs, 
but it is clear that in this minor Greek city, under foreign 
rule, he was able to obtain and read and study manuscripts 
of nearly everything that had been written in the Greek lan- 
gTiage before his time. He travelled, so far as one can gather, 
with freedom and comfort about the Greek archipelagoes; he 
stayed wherever he wanted to stay, and he seems to have found 
comfortable accommodation; he went to Babylon and to Susa, 
the new capital the Persians had set up in Babylonia to the 
east of the Tigris ; he toured along the coast of the Black Sea, 
and accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge about 
the Scythians, the Aryan people who were then distributed over 
South Russia ; he w^ent to the south of Italy, explored the 
antiquities of Tyre, coasted Palestine, landed at Gaza, and made 
a long stay in Egypt. He went about Egypt looking at temples 
and monuments and gathering information. We know not only 
from him, but from other evidence, that in those days the older 
temples and the pyramids (which were already nearly three 
thousand years old) were visited by strings of tourists, a special 
sort of priests acting as guides. The inscriptions the sightseers 
scribbled upon the walls remain to this day, and many of them 
have been deciphered and published. 

As his knowledge accumulated, he conceived the idea of writ- 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 



203 




204 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ing a gi'eat history of the attempts of Persia to subdue Greece, 
But in order to introduce that history he composed an account 
of the past of Greece, Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, 
Scythia, and of the geography and peoples of those countries. 
He then set himself, it is said, to make his history known among 
his friends in Halicarnassus by reciting it to them, but they 
failed to appreciate it; and he then betook himself to Athens, 
the most flourishing of all Greek cities at that time. There his 
work was received with applause. We find him in the centre 
of a brilliant circle of intelligent and active-minded people, and 
the city authorities voted him a reward of ten talents (a sum 
of money equivalent to £2,400) in recognition of his literary 
achievement. . . . 

But we will not complete the biography of this most inter- 
esting man, nor will we enter into any criticism of his garrulous, 
marvel-telling, and most entertaining history. It is a book to 
which all intelligent readers come sooner or later, abounding as 
it does in illuminating errors and Boswellian charm. We give 
these particulars here simply to show that in the fifth century 
B.C. a new factor was becoming evident in human affairs. Bead- 
ing and writing had already long escaped from the temple pre- 
cincts and the ranks of the court scribes. Record was no longer 
confined to court and temple. A new sort of people, these peo- 
ple of leisure and independent means, were asking questions, 
exchanging knowledge and views, and developing ideas. So be- 
neath the march of armies and the policies of monarchs, and 
above the common lives of illiterate and incurious men, we 
note the beginnings of what is becoming at last nowadays a 
dominant power in human affairs, the free intelligence of 
mankind. 

Of that free intelligence we shall have more to say when in 
a subsequent chapter we tell of the Greeks. 

§ 4 

We may summarize the discussion of the last two chapters 
here by making a list of the chief elements in this complicated 
accumulation of human beings which made up the later Baby- 
lonian and Egyptian civilizations of from two thousand five 
hundred to three thousand years ago. These elements grew up 
and became distinct one from another in the great river valleys 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 205 

of the world in the course of five or six thousand years. They 
developed mental dispositions an^ traditions and attitudes of 
thought one to another. The civilization in vi'hich we live to- 
day is simply carrying on and still further developing and work- 
ing out and rearranging these relationships. This is the world 
from which we inherit. It is only hy the attentive study of 
their origins that we can detach ourselves from the prejudices 
and immediate ideas of the particular class to which we may 
belong, and begin to understand the social and political questions 
of our own time. 

(1) First, then, came the priesthood, the temple system, 
which was the nucleus and the guiding intelligence about which 
the primitive civilizations grew. It was still in these later days 
a great power in the world, the chief repository of knowledge 
and tradition, an influence over the lives of every one, and a 
binding force to hold the community together. But it was no 
longer all-powerful, because its nature made it conservative and 
inadaptable. It no longer monopolized knowledge nor initiated 
fresh ideas. Learning had already leaked out to other less 
pledged and controlled people, who thought for themselves. 
About the temple system were grouped its priests and priestesses, 
its scribes, its physicians, its magicians, its lay brethren, treas- 
urers, managers, directors, and the like. It owned great prop- 
erties and often hoarded huge treasures. 

(2) Over against the priesthood, and originally arising out 
of it, was the court system, headed by a king or a "king of 
kings," who was in later Assyria and Babylonia a sort of cap- 
tain and lay controller of affairs, and in Egypt a god-man, who 
had released himself from the control of his priests. About 
the monarch were accumulated his scribes, counsellors, record 
keepers, agents, captains, and guards. Many of his officials, 
particularly his provincial officials, had great subordinate estab- 
lishments, and were constantly tending to become independent. 
The nobility of the old river valley civilizations arose out of 
the court system. It was, therefore, a different thing in its 
origins from the nobility of the early Aryans, which was a re- 
publican nobility of elders and leading men. 

(3) At the base of the social pyramid was the large and most 
necessary class in the community, the tillers of the soil. Their 
status varied from age to age and in different lands ; they were 



206 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

free peasants paying taxes, or serfs of the god, or serfs or 
tenants of king or noble, or of a private owner, paying him a 
rent; in most eases tax or rent was paid in produce. In the 
states of the river valleys they were high cultivators, cultivating 
comparatively small holdings; they lived together for safety 
in villages, and had a common interest in maintaining their irri- 
gation channels and a sense of community in their village life. 
The cultivation of the soil is an exacting occupation ; the sea- 
sons and the harvest sunsets will not wait for men ; claildren can 
be utilized at an early age, and so the cultiva'tor class is gen- 
erally a poorly educated, close-toiling class, superstitious by 
reason of ignorance and the uncertainty of the seasons, ill-in- 
formed and easily put upon. It is capable at times of great 
passive resistance, but it has no purpose in its round but crops 
and crops, to keep out of debt and hoard against bad times. So 
it has remained to our own days over the greater part of Europe 
and Asia. 

(4) Differing widely in origin and quality from the tillers 
of the soil was the artisan class. At first, this was probably 
in part a town-slave class, in part it consisted of peasants who 
had specialized upon a craft. But in developing an art and 
mystery of its own, a technique that had to be learnt before it 
could be practised, each sort of craft probably developed a cer- 
tain independence and a certain sense of community of its own. 
The artisans were able to get together and discuss their affairs 
more readily than the toilers on the land, and they were able 
to form g-uilds to restrict output, maintain rates of pay, and 
protect their common interest. 

(5) As the power of the Babylonian rulers spread out beyond 
the original areas of good husbandry into grazing regions and 
less fertile districts, a class of herdsmen came into existence. 
In the case of Babylonia these were nomadic Semites, the 
Bedouin, like the Bedouin of to-day. They probably grazed 
their flocks over gi-eat areas much as the sheep ranchers of 
California do. They were paid and esteemed much more highly 
than the husbandmen. 

(6) The first merchants in the world were shipowners like 
the people of Tyre and Cnossos, or nomads who carried and 
traded goods as they wandered between one area of primitive 
civilization and another. In the Babylonian and Assyrian 
world the traders were predominantly the Semitic Arameans, 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 207 

the ancestors of the modern Syrians. They became a distinct 
factor in the life of the community; they formed great house- 
holds of their own. Usury developed largely in the last thou- 
sand years b.c. Traders needed accommodation; cultivators 
wished to anticipate their crops. Sayce (op. cit.) gives an ac- 
count of the Babylonian banking-house of Egibi, which lasted 
through several generations and outlived the Chaldean Empire. 

(7) A class of small retailers, one must suppose, came into 
existence with the complication of society during the later 
days of the first empires, but it was not probably of any gTcat 
importance. 

(8) A growing class of independent property owners. 

(9) As the amenities of life increased, there grew up in the 
court, temples, and prosperous private houses a class of domestic 
servants, slaves or freed slaves^ or young peasants taken into 
the household. 

(10) Gang vjorkers. — These were prisoners of war or debt 
slaves, or impressed or deported men. 

(11) Mercenary soldiers. — These were also often captives or 
impressed men. Sometimes they were enlisted from friendly 
foreig-n populations in which the military spirit still pi'evailed. 

(12) Seamen. 

In modern political and economic discussions we are apt to 
talk rather glibly of "labour." Much has been made of the 
solidarity of labour and its sense of community. It is v/ell to 
note that in these first civilizations, what we speak of as 
"labour" is represented by five distinct classes dissimilar in 
origin, traditions, and outlook — namely, classes 3, 4, 5, 9-, 10, 
and the oar-tugging part of 12. The "solidarity of labour" is, we 
shall find when we come to study the mechanical revolution of 
the nineteenth century a.d.^ a new idea and a new possibility in 
human affairs. 



Let us, before we leave this discussion of the social classes 
that were developing in these first civilizations, devote a little 
attention to their fixity. How far did they stand aloof from 
each other, and how far did they intermingle? So far as the 
classes we have counted as 9, 10, 11, and 12 go, the servants, 
the gang labourers and slaves, the gang soldiers, and to a lesser 



208 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

extent the sailors, or at any rate the galley rowers among the 
sailors, they were largely recruited classes, they did not readily 
and easily forai homes, they were not distinctively breeding 
classes ; they were probably replenished generation after genera- 
tion by captives, by the failures of other classes, and especially 
from the failures of the class of small retailers, and by persua- 
sion and impressment from among the cultivators. But so far 
as the sailors go, we have to distinguish between the mere rower 
and the navigating and shipowning seaman of such ports as Tyre 
and Sidon. The shipowners pass, no doubt, by insensible grada- 
tions into the mercantile class, but the navigators must have 
made a peculiar community in the great seaports, having homes 
there and handing on the secrets of seacraft to their sons. The 
eighth class we have distinguished was certainly a precarious 
class, continually increased by the accession of the heirs and de- 
pendents, the widows and retired members of the wealthy and 
powerful, and continually diminished by the deaths or specula- 
tive losses of these people and the dispersal of their properties. 
The priests and priestess, too, so far as all this world west of 
India went, were not a very reproductive class; many priest- 
hoods were celibate, and that class, too, may also be counted 
as a recruited class. Nor are servants, as a rule, reproductive. 
They live in the households of other people; they do not have 
households and rear large families of their own. This leaves us 
as the really vital classes of the ancient civilized community : 

(a) The royal and aristocratic class, officials, military offi- 
cers, and the like; 

(&) The mercantile class; 

(c) The town artisans; 

(d) The cultivators of the soil; and 

(e) The herdsmen. 

Each of these classes reared its own children in its own 
fashion, and so naturally kept itself more or less continuously 
distinct from the others. General education was not organized 
in those ancient states, education was mainly a household mat- 
ter (as it is still in many parts of India to-day), and so it 
was natural and necessary for the sons to follow in the footsteps 
of their father and to marry women accustomed to their own 
sort of household. Except during times of great political dis- 
turbance, therefore, there would be a natural and continuous 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 209 

separation of classes ; which would not, however, prevent ex- 
ceptional individuals from intermarrying or passing from one 
class to another. Poor aristocrats would marry rich members 
of the mercantile class ; ambitious herdsmen, artisans, or sailors 
would become rich merchants. So far as one can gather, that 
was the general state of affairs in both Egypt and Babylonia. 
The idea was fonnerly entertained that in Egypt there was a 
fixity of classes, but this appears to be a misconception due to 
a misreading of Herodotus. The only exclusive class in Egypt 
which did not intei-marry was, as in England to-day, the semi- 
divine royal family. 

At various points in the social system there were probably 
developments of exclusiveness, an actual barring out of inter- 
lopers. Artisans of particular crafts possessing secrets, for ex- 
ample, have among all races and in all ages tended to develop 
guild organizations restricting the practice of their craft and 
the marriage of members outside their gaiild. Conquering peo- 
ple have also, and especially when there were marked physical 
differences of race, been disposed to keep themselves aloof from 
the conquered peoples, and have developed an aristocratic ex- 
clusiveness. Such organizations of restriction upon free inter- 
course have come and gone in great variety in the history of all 
long-standing civilizations. The natural boundaries of func- 
tion were always there, but sometimes they have been drawn 
sharply and laid stress upon, and sometimes they have been 
made little of. There has been a general tendency among the 
Aryan peoples to distinguish noble (patrician) from common 
(plebeian) families; the traces of it are evident throughout 
the literature and life of Europe to-day, and it has received a 
picturesque enforcement in the "science" of heraldry. This 
tradition is still active even in democratic America. Germany, 
tlie most methodical of European countries, had in the Middle 
Ages a very clear conception of the fixity of such distinctions. 
Below the princes (who themselves constituted an exclusive class 
which did not marry beneath itself) there were the : 

(a) Knights, the military and official caste, with heraldic 
coats-of-arms ; 

{b and c) The Biirgerstand, the merchants, shipping people, 
and artisans; and 

(d) The Bauemstand, the cultivating serfs or peasants. 

Mediaival Germany went as far as any of the Western heirs 



210 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of the first great civilizations towards a fixation of classes. The 
idea is far less congenial both to the English-speaking people 
and to the French and Italians, who, by a sort of instinct, 
favour a free movement from class to class. Such exclusive 
ideas began at first among, and were promoted chiefiy by, the 
upper classes, but it is a natural response and a natural Nemesis 
to such ideas that the mass of the excluded should presently 
range themselves in antagonism to their superiors. It was in 
Germany, as we shall see in the concluding chapters of this story, 
that the conception of a natural and necessary conflict, "the 
class war," between the miscellaneous multitudes of the dis- 
inherited ("the class-conscious proletariat" of the Marxist) and 
the rulers and merchants first arose. It was an idea more ac- 
ceptable to the German mind than to the British or French. 
. . . But before we come to that conflict, we must traverse a 
long history of many centuries. 

§ 6 

If now we turn eastward from this main development of civ- 
ilization in the world between Central Asia and the Atlantic, 
to the social development of India in the 2,000 years next be- 
fore the Christian era, we find certain broad and very interest- 
ing differences. The first of these is that we find such a fixity 
of classes in process of establishment as no other part of the 
world can present. This fixity of classes is known to Euro- 
peans as the institution of caste; ^ its origins are still in com- 
plete obscurity, but it was certainly well rooted in the Ganges 
valley before the days of Alexander the Great. It is a com- 
plicated horizontal division of the social structure into classes 
or castes, the members of which may neither eat nor intermarry 
with persons of a lower caste under penalty of becoming out- 
casts, and who may also "lose caste" for various ceremonial 
negligences and defilements. By losing caste a man does not 
sink to a lower caste; he becomes outcast. The various sub- 
divisions of caste are very complex ; many are practically trade 
organizations. Each caste has its local organization which main- 
tains discipline, distributes various charities, looks after its 
own pfoor, protects the common interests of its members, and 

* From casta, a word of Portuguese origin ; the Indian word is vama, 
colour. 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 211 

examines the credentials of new-comers from other districts. 
(There is little to check the pretensions of a travellin^^ Hindu 
to be of a higher caste than is legitimately his.) Originally, 
the four main castes seem to have been : 

The Bralimins — the priests and teachers ; 

The Kshatriyas — the warriors ; 

The Vaisyas — herdsmen, merchants, moneylenders, and land- 
owners ; 

The Sudras ; 

And, outside the castes, the Pariahs. 

But these primary divisions have long been complicated by 
subdivision into a multitude of minor castes, all exclusive, each 
holding its members to one definite way of living and one group 
of associates. In Bengal the Kshatriyas and Vaisyas have 
largely disappeared. But this is too intricate a question for us 
to deal with here in any detail. 

Next to this extraordinary fission and complication of tlie 
social body we have to note that the Brahmins, the priests and 
teachers of the Indian world, unlike so many Western priest- 
hoods, are a reproductive and exclusive class, taking no recruits 
from any other social stratum. 

Whatever may have been the original incentive to this ex- 
tensive fixation of class in India, there can be little doubt of 
the role played by the Brahmins as the custodians of tradition 
and the only teachers of the people in sustaining it. By some 
it is supposed that the first three of the four original castes, 
known also as the "twice born," were the descendants of the 
Vedic Aryan conquerors of India, who established these hard- 
and-fast separations to prevent racial mixing with the conquered 
Sudras and Pariahs. The Sudras are represented as a previous 
wave of northern conquerors, and the Parialis are the original 
Dravidian inhabitants of India. But these speculations are not 
universally accepted, and it is, perhaps, rather the case that 
the unifonn conditions of life in the Ganges valley throughout 
long centuries served to stereotype a difference of classes that 
have never had the same steadfastness of definition under the 
more various and variable conditions of the greater world to 
the west. 

However caste arose, there can be no doubt of its extraordi- 
naiy hold upon the Indian mind. In the sixth century b.c. 
arose Gautama, the great teacher of Buddhism, proclaiming, 



212 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

"As the four streams that flow into the Ganges lose their names 
as soon as they mingle their waters in the holy river, so all who 
believe in Buddha cease to be Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, 
and Sudras." His teaching prevailed in India for some cen- 
turies ; it spread over China, Tibet, Japan, Burmah, Ceylon, 
Turkestan, Manchuria ; it is to-day the religion of a large frac- 
tion of the human race, but it was finally defeated and driven 
out of Indian life by the vitality and persistence of the Brah- 
mins and of their caste i( 



In China we find a social system travelling along yet another, 
and only a very roughly parallel line to that followed by the 
Indian and Western civilizations. The Chinese civilization 
even more than the Hindu is organized for peace, and the war- 
rior plays a small part in its social scheme. As in the Indian 
civilization, the leading class is an intellectual one ; less priestly 
than the Brahmin and more oificial. But unlike the Brahmins, 
the mandarins, who are the literate men of China, are not a 
caste ; one is not a mandarin by birth, but by education ; they 
are drawn by education and examination from all classes of 
the community, and the son of a mandarin has no prescriptive 
right to succeed his father.^ As a consequence of these differ- 
ences, while the Brahmins of India are, as a class, ignorant 
even of their own sacred books, mentally slack, and full of a 
pretentious assurance, the Chinese mandarin has the energy 
that comes from hard mental work. But since his education so 
far has been almost entirely a scholarly study of the classical 
Chinese literature, his influence has been entirely conservative. 
Before the days of Alexander the Great, China had already 
formed itself and set its feet in the way in which it was still 
walking in the year 1,000 a. d. Invaders and dynasties had come 
and gone, but the routine of life of the yellow civilization re- 
mained unchanged. 

The traditional Chinese social system recognized four main 
classes below the priest-emperor. 

' In the time of Confucius classes were much more fixed tlian later. 
Under the Han dynasty the competitive examination system was not yet 
established. Scholars were recommended for appointments by local dig- 
nitaries, etc. — L. Y. C. 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 213 

(a) The literary class, which was equivalent partly to the 
officials of the Western world and partly to its teachers and 
clerics. In the time of Confucius its education included archery 
and horsemanship. Rites and music, history and mathematics 
completed the ''Six Accomplishments." 

(h) The cultivators of the land. 

(c) The artisans. 

(d) The mercantile class. 

But since from the earliest times it has been the Chinese way 
to divide the landed possessions of a man amoni^ all his sons, 
there has never been in Chinese history any class of great land- 
owners, renting their land to tenants, such as most other coun- 
tries have displayed. The Chinese land has always been cut 
up into small holdings, which are chiefly freeholds, and culti- 
vated intensively. There are landlords in China who own one 
or a few farms and rent them to tenants, but there are no 
great, permanent estates. When a patch of land, by repeated 
division, is too small to sustain a man, it is sold to some prosper- 
ing neighbour, and the former owner drifts to one of the great 
towns of China to join the mass of wage-earning workers there. 
In China, for many centuries, there have been these masses of 
town population with scarcely any property at all, men neither 
serfs nor slaves, but held to their daily work by their utter 
impecuniousness. From such masses it is that the soldiers 
needed by the Chinese Government are recruited, and also such 
gang labour as has been needed for the making of canals, the 
building of walls, and the like has been drawn. The war cap- 
tive and the slave class play a smaller part in Chinese history 
than in any more westerly record of these ages before the 
Christian era. 

One fact, we may note, is common to all these three stories 
of developing social stnicture and that is the immense power 
exercised by the educated class in the early stages before the 
crown or the commonalty began to read and, consequently, to 
think for itself. In India, by reason of their exclusiveness, the 
Brahmins, the educated class, retain their influence to this day ; 
over the masses of China, along entirely different lines and be- 
cause of the complexities of the written language, the man- 
darinate has prevailed. The diversity of race and tradition in 
the more various and eventful world of the West has delayed, 
and perhaps arrested for ever, any parallel organization of tiie 



214 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

specially intellectual elements of society into a class ascendancy. 
In the Western world, as we have already noted, education early 
"slopped over," and soaked away out of the control of any spe- 
cial class ; it escaped from the limitation of castes and priest- 
hoods and traditions into the general life of the community. 
Writing and reading had been simplified down to a point when 
it was no longer possible to make a cult and mystery of them. 
It may be due to the peculiar elaboration and difficulty of the 
Chinese characters, rather than to any racial difference, that the 
same thing did not happen to the same extent in China. 

§ 8 

In these last six chapters we have traced in outline the whole 
process by which, in the course of 5,000 or 6,000 years — that 
is to say, in something between 150 and 200 generations — man- 
kind passed from the stage of early Neolithic husbandry, in 
w4iich the primitive skin-clad family tribe reaped and stored 
in their rude mud huts the M'ild-gTowing fodder and grain-bear- 
ing grasses with sickles of stone, to the days of the fourth cen- 
tury B.C., when all round the shores of the Mediterranean and 
up the Nile, and across Asia to India, and again over the great 
alluvial areas of China, spread the fields of human cultivation 
and busy cities, great temples, and the coming and going of 
human commerce. Galleys and lateen-sailed ships entered and 
left crowded harbours, and made their careful way from head- 
land to headland and from headland to island, keeping always 
close to the land. Phoenician shipping under Egy'ptian owners 
was making its way into the East Indies and perhaps even 
further into the Pacific. Across the deserts of Africa and 
Arabia and through Turkestan toiled the caravans with their re- 
mote trade; silk was already coming from China, ivory from 
Central Africa, and tin from Britain to the centres of this new 
life in the w^orld. Men had learnt to weave fine linen ^ and 
delicate fabrics of coloured wool; they could bleach and dye; 
they had iron as well as copper, bronze, silver, and gold; they 
had made the most beautiful pottery and porcelain ; there was 
hardly a variety of precious stone in the world that they had 
not found and cut and polished; they could read and write; 
divert the course of rivers, pile pyramids, and make walls a 
^Damascus was already making Damask, and "Damascening" steel. 



SERFS, SLAVES, SOCIAL CLASSES 215 

thousand miles long. The fifty or sixty centuries in which all 
this had to be achieved may seem a long time in comparison 
with the threescore and ten years of a single human life, but 
it is utterly inconsiderable in comparison with the stretches of 
geological time. Measr.ring backward from these Alexandrian 
cities to the days of the first stone implements the rostro-carinate 
implements of the Pliocene Age, gives us an extent of time fully 
a hundred times as long. 

We have tried in this account, and with the help of maps 
and figures and time charts, to give a just idea of the order and 
shape of these fifty or sixty centuries. Our business is with 
that outline. We have named but a few names of individuals ; 
though henceforth the personal names must increase in number. 
But the content of this outline that we have drawn here in 
a few diagrams and charts cannot but touch the imagination. 
If only we could look closelier, we should see through all these 
sixty centuries a procession of lives more and more akin in their 
fashion to our own. We have shown how the naked Palaeo- 
lithic savage gave place to the Neolithic cultivator, a type of 
man still to be found in the backward places of the world. We 
have given an illustration of Sumerian soldiers copied from a 
carved stone that was set up long before the days when the 
Semitic Sargon I conquered the land. Day by day some busy 
brownish man cai-ved those figures, and, no doubt, whistled as 
he carved. In those days the plain of the Egyptian delta was 
crowded with gangs of swarthy workmen unloading the stone 
that had come down the Nile to add a fresh course to the cur- 
rent pyramid. One might paint a thousand scenes from those 
ages: of some hawker merchant in Egypt spreading his stock 
of Babylonish garments before the eyes of some pretty, rich 
lady ; of a miscellaneous crowd swarming between the pylons 
to some temple festival at Thebes ; of an excited, dark-eyed 
audience of Cretans like the Spaniards of to-day, watching a 
bull-fight, with the bull-fighters in trousers and tightly girded, 
exactly like any contemporary bull-fighter; of children learning 
their cuneiform sigiis — at Nippur the clay exercise tiles of a 
school have been found; of a woman with a sick husband at 
home slipping into some gTeat temple in Carthage to make a 
vow for his recovery. Or perhaps it is a wild Greek, skin-clad 
and armed with a bronze axe, standing motionless on some 
Illyrian mountain crest, struck with amazement at his first 



216 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

vision of a many-oared Cretan galley crawling like a great in- 
sect across the amethystine mirror of the Adriatic Sea. He 
went home to tell his folk a strange story of a monster, Briareus 
with his Imndred anns. Of millions of such stitches in each 
of these 200 generations is the fabric of this history woven. But 
unless they mark the presence of a primary seam or join, we 
cannot pause now to examine any of these stitches. 



XIX 

THE HEBEEW SCRIPTUEES AA^D THE PROPHETS 

§ 1, The Place of the Israelites in History. § 2. Saul, David, 
and Solomon. § 3. The Jews a People of Mixed Origin. 
§ 4. The Importance of the Hebrew Prophets. 



WE are now in a position to place in their proper re- 
lationship to this general outline of human history the 
Israelites, and the most remarkable collection of an- 
cient documents in the world, that collection which is known to 
all Christian peoples as the Old Testament. We find in these 
documents the most interesting and valuable lights upon the 
development of civilization, and the clearest indications of a 
new spirit that was coming into human affairs during the strug- 
gles of Egypt and Assyria for predominance in the world of 
men. 

All the books that constitute the Old Testament were cer- 
tainly in existence, and in very much their present form, at latest 
by the year 100 b.c. Most of them were probably recognized 
as sacred writings in the time of Alexander the Great (330 
B.C.). They were the sacred literature of a people, the Jews, 
who, except for a small remnant of common people, had re- 
cently been deported to Babylonia from their own country in 
587 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Chaldean. They had re- 
turned to their city, Jeiiisalem, and had rebuilt their temple 
there under the auspices of Cyrus, that Persian conqueror who, 
we have already noted, in 539 b.c. overthrew ISTabonidus, the 
last of the Chaldean rulers in Babylon. The Babylonian Cap- 
tivity had lasted about fifty years, and many authorities are of 
opinion that there was a considerable admixture during that 
period both of race and ideas with the Babylonians. 

The position of the land of Judea and of Jerusalem, its 
217 



218 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

capital, is a peculiar one. The country is a band-shaped strip 
between the Mediterranean to the west and the desert beyond 
the Jordan to the east ; through it lies the natural high-road be- 
tween the Hittites, Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia to the north 
and Egypt to the south. It was a country predestined, there- 
fore, to a stomiy history. Across it Egypt, and whatever power 
was ascendant in the north, fought for empire; against its people 
they fought for a trade route. It had itself neither the area, 
the agricultural possibilities, nor the mineral wealth to be im- 
portant. The story of its people that these scriptures have 
preserved runs like a commentary to the gTeater history of the 
two systems of civilization to the north and south and of the 
sea peoples to the west. 

These scriptures consist of a number of different elements. 
The first five books, the Pentateuch, were early regarded with 
peculiar respect. They begin in the form of a universal his- 
tory with a double account of the Creation of the world and 
mankind, of the early life of the race, and of a gTeat Flood 
by which, except for certain favoured individuals, mankind 
was destroyed. This flood story is very widely distributed in 
ancient traditions ; it may be a memory of that flooding of the 
Mediterranean valley which occurred in the ISTeolithic age of 
mankind. Excavations have revealed Babylonian versions of 
both the Creation story and the Flood story of prior date to 
the restoration of the Jews, and it is therefore argued by Bibli- 
cal critics that these opening chapters were acquired by the 
Jews during their captivity. They constitute the first ten chap- 
ters of Genesis. 

There follows a history of the fathers and founders of the 
Hebrew nation, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are presented 
as patriarchal Bedouin chiefs, living the life of nomadic shep- 
herds in the country between Babylonia and Egypt. The ex- 
isting Biblical account is said by the critics to be made up out 
of several pre-existing versions ; but whatever its origins, the 
story, as we have it to-day, is full of colour and vitality. What 
is called Palestine to-day was at that time the land of Canaan, 
inhabited by a Semitic people called the Canaanites, closely 
related to the Phoenicians wdio founded Tyre and Sidon, and to 
the Amorites who took Babylon and, under Hammurabi, founded 
the first Babylonian Empire. The Canaanites were a settled 
folk in the days — which w^ere perhaps contemporary with the 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 



21d 



<ri^ r ATSLD of t£c KEBRB^VS^ 



ifiZZ. cauxdry shaded 



'Rouie. from. Phoenicia, 
to the. 'Rid Sea., across 
PaLe.stine'. . ■ . — — > n ' 

f The distance. £vth, ly're. t> 
Jeznisalem. is rouahJy lOO 
TrwLzs — about t&t of London, 
to Bristol From. Tyre to the 

Sea. is about me same, 
distajice. as from, LondorL tx> 




MUcs 



220 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

days of liammiirabi — when Abraliam's flocks and herds passed 
through the land. The God of Abraham, says the Bible narra- 
tive, promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and 
to his children. To the book of Genesis the reader must go 
to read how Abraham, being childless, doubted this promise, 
and of the births of Ishmael and Isaac. And in Genesis, too, 
he will find the lives of Isaac and Jacob, whose name was 
changed to Israel, and of the twelve sons of Israel ; and 
how in the days of a great famine they went down into 
Egypt. With that. Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, 
ends. The next book, Exodus, is concerned with the story of 
Moses. 

The story of the settlement and slavery of the children of 
Israel in Egypt is a difficult one. There is an Egyptian rec- 
ord of a settlement of certain Semitic peoples in the land of 
Goshen by the Pharaoh Pameses II, and it is stated that they 
were drawn into Egypt by want of food. But of the life and 
career of Moses there is no Egyptian record at all; there is 
no account of any plagues of Egypt or of any Pharaoh who 
was drowned in the Red Sea. 

Very perplexing is the discovery of a clay tablet written by 
the Egyptian governors of a city in Canaan to the Pharaoh 
Amenophis IV, who came in the XVIIIth Dynasty before 
Rameses II, apparently mentioning the Hebrews by name and 
declaring that they are overrunning Canaan. Manifestly, if 
the Hebrews were conquering Canaan in the time of the 
XVIIIth Dynasty, the}^ could not have been made captive and 
oppressed, before they conquered Canaan, by Rameses II of 
the XlXth Dynasty. But it is quite understandable that the 
Exodus story, written long after the events it narrates, may 
have concentrated and simplified, and perhaps personified and 
symbolized, what was really a long and complicated history 
of tribal invasions. One Hebrew tribe may have drifted down 
into Egypt and become enslaved, while the others were already 
attacking the outlying Canaanite cities. It is even possible 
that the land of the captivity was not Egypt (Hebrew, Misraim), 
but Misrim in the north of Arabia, on the other side of the 
Red Sea. These questions are discussed fully and acutely in 
the Encyclopaedia Bihlica (articles Moses and Exodus), to 
which the curious reader must be referred.-^ 
* See also G. B. Gray, A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament. 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 221 

Two other books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy and Leviti- 
cus, are concerned with the Law and the priestly rules. The 
book of Numbers takes up the wanderings of the Israelites in the 
desert and their invasion of Canaan. 

Whatever the true particulars of the Hebrew invasion of 
Canaan may be, there can be no doubt that the country they 
invaded had changed very greatly since the days of the legend- 
ary promise, made centuries before, to Abraham. Then it 
seems to have been largely a Semitic land, with many pros- 
perous trading cities. But great waves of strange peoples had 
washed along this coast. We have already told how the dark 
Iberian or Mediterranean peoples of Italy and Greece', the peo- 
ples of that ^gean civilization which culminated at Cnossos, 
were being assailed by the southward movement of Aryan-speak- 
ing races, such as the Italians and Greeks, and how Cnossos 
was sacked about 1,400 b.c, and destroyed altogether about 
1,000 B.C. It is now evident that the people of these ^gean 
seaports were crossing the sea in search of securer land 
nests. They invaded the Egyptian delta and the African 
coast to the west, they formed alliances with the Hittites and 
other Aryan or Aryanized races. This happened after the time 
of Rameses II, in the time of Rameses III. Eg}^ptian monu- 
ments record great sea fights, and also a march of these peo- 
ple along the coast of Palestine towards Egypt. Their trans- 
port was in the ox-carts characteristic of the Aryan tribes, and 
it is clear that these Cretans were acting in alliance with some 
early Aryan invaders. 'No connected narrative of these conflicts 
that went on between 1,300 b.c. and 1,000 b.c. has yet been 
made out, but it is evident from the Bible narrative, that when 
the Hebrews under Joshua pursued their slow subjugation of 
the promised land, they came against a new people, the Phil- 
istines, unknown to Abraham,^ who were settling along the 
coast in a series of cities of which Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon, 
and Joppa became the chief, who were really, like the Hebrews, 
new-comers, and probably chiefly these Cretans from the sea and 
from the north. The invasion, therefore, that began as an at- 
tack upon the Canaanites, speedily became a long and not very 
successful struggle for the coveted and promised land with 
these much more formidable new-comers, the Philistines. 

* This may seem to contradict Genesis xx. 15, and xxi. and xxvi. various 
verses, but compare with this the Encyclop<edi<i Biblica article Philistines. 



222 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

It cannot be said that the promised land was ever completely 
in the grasp of the Hebrews. Following after the Pentateuch 
in the Bible come the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth (a di- 
gression), Samuel I and II, and Kings I and II, with Chronicles 
repeating with variation much of the matter of Samuel II and 
Kings ; there is a growing flavour of reality in most of this 
latter history, and in these books we find the Philistines 
steadfastly in possession cf the fertile lowlands of the south, 
and the Canaanites and Phoenicians holding out against the 
Israelites in the north. The first triumphs of Joshua are not 
repeated. The bock of Judges is a melancholy catalogue of 
failures. The people lose heart. They desert the worship of 
their own god Jehovah, and worship Baal and Ashtaroth 
( = Bel and Ishtar). They mixed their race with the Philistines, 
with the Hittites, and so forth, and became, as they have always 
subsequently been, a racially mixed people. Under a series 
of wise men and heroes they wage a generally unsuccessful and 
never very united warfare against their enemies. In succession 
they are conquered by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Midi- 
anites, and the Philistines. The story of these conflicts, of 
Gideon and of Samson and the other heroes who now and then 
cast a gleam of hope upon the distress of Israel, is told in the 
book of Judges. In the first book of Samuel is told the story 
of their great disaster at Ebenezer in the days when Eli was 
judge. 

This was a real pitched battle in which the Israelites lost 
30,000 ( !) men. They had previously suffered a reverse and 
lost 4,000 men, and then they brought out their most sacred 
symbol, the Ark of the Covenant of God. 

''And when the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into 
the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the 
earth rang again. And when the Philistines heard the noise 
of the shout, they said, 'What meaneth the noise of this great 
shout in the camp of the Hebrews V And they understood that 
the ark of the Lord was come into the camp. And the Phil- 
istines were afraid, for they said, 'God is come into the camp.' 
And they said, 'Woe unto us ! for there hath not been such a 
thing heretofore. Woe unto us ! who shall deliver us out of 
the hand of these mighty Gods ? these are the Gods that smote 
the Egyptians with all the plagues in the wilderness. Be 
strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 22S 

be not servants unto the Hebrews, as tbey have been to yon : 
qnit yourselves like men, and fight.' 

''And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and 
they fled every man into his tent : and there was a very ^eat 
slaughter for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen. 
And the ark of God was taken ; and the two sons of Eli, liophni 
and Phinehas, were slain. 

"And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the anny, and 
came to Shilch the same day, with his clothes rent, and with 
earth upon his head. And when he came, lo, Eli sat upon 
a seat by the wayside watching: for his heart trembled for the 
ark of God. And when the man came into the city, and told 
it, all the city cried out. And when Eli heard the noise of the 
cr)'ing, he said, 'What meaneth the noise of this tumult ?' And 
the man came in hastily, and told Eli. ISTow Eli was ninety 
and eight years old; and his eyes were dim that he could not 
see. And the man said unto Eli, 'I am he that came out of 
the army, and I fled to-day out of the army.' And he said, 
'What is there done, my son V And the messenger answered 
and said, 'Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath 
been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two 
sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of 
God is taken.' And it came to pass, when he made mention 
of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward, 
by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for 
he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel 
forty years. 

"And his daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child, 
near to be delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the 
ark of God was taken, and that her father in law and her 
husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed: for her 
pains came upon her. And about the time of her death the 
women that stood by her said unto her, 'Fear not, for thou 
hast borne a son.' But she answered not, neither did she regard 
it. And she named the child I-chabod,^ saying, 'The glory 
is departed from Israel' : because the ark of God was taken, 
and because of her father in law and her husband." (I. Sam., 
chap, iv.) 

The successor of Eli and the last of the judges was Samuel, 
and at the end of his rule came an event in the history of 
*That is, where is the glory? 



224 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Israel wLicli paralleled and was suggested by the experience 
of the gTeater nations around. A king arose. We are told in 
vivid language the plain issue between the more ancient rule 
of priestcraft and the newer fashion in human affairs. It is 
impossible to avoid a second quotation. 

"Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, 
and came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him: 'Be- 
hold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways : now 
make us a king to judge us like all the nations.' 

''But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, 'Give 
us a king to judge us.' And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. 
And the Lord said unto Samuel, 'Hearken unto the voice of 
the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not 
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign 
over them. According to all the works which they have done 
since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even imto 
this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and seiwe other 
gods, so do they also unto thee. I^ow, therefore, hearken unto 
their voice : howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew 
them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.' 

"And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people 
that asked of him a king. And he said, 'This will be the man- 
ner of the king that shall reign over you : He will take your 
sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his 
horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will 
appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties ; 
and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, 
and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his 
chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioners, 
and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, 
and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, 
and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of 
your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and 
to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your 
maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, 
and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your 
sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in 
that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you ; 
and the Lord will not hear you in that day.' 

"Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel;; 
and they said, 'Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 225 

also may be like all the nations ; and that our king may judge 
us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.' " (I. Sam., 
chap, viii.) 

§ 2 

But the nature and position of their land was against the 
Hebrews, and their first king Saul was no more successful than 
their judges. The long intrigTies of the adventurer David 
against Saul are told in the rest of the firsts book of Samuel, 
and the end of Saul was utter defeat upon Mount Gilboa. His 
army was overwhelmed by the Philistine archers. 

"And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines 
came to strip the slain, that they found Saul and his three 
sons fallen in Mount Gilboa. And they cut off his head, and 
stripped off his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines 
round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and 
among the people. And they put his armour in the house of 
Ashtaroth ; and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth- 
shan." (I. Sam., chap, xxxi.) 

David (990 b.c. roughly) was more politic and successful 
than his predecessor, and he seems to have placed himself under 
the protection of Hiram, King of Tyre. This Phoenician 
alliance sustained him, and was the essential element in the 
greatness of his son Solomon. His story, with its constant 
assassinations and execiiiions, reads rather like the history of 
some savage chief than of a civilized monarch. It is told with 
great vividness in the second book of Samuel. 

The first book of Kings begins with the reign of King 
Solomon (960 b.c. roughly). The most interesting thing in 
that story, from the point of view of the general historian, is 
the relationship of Solomon to the national religion and the 
pi'iesthood, and his dealings with the tabernacle, the priest 
Zadok, and the prophet ISTathan. 

The opening of Solomon's reigii is as bloody as his father's. 
The last recorded speech of David arranges for the murder 
of Shimei; his last recorded word is "blood." "But his hoar 
head bring thou down to the grave with blood," he says, point- 
ing out that though old Shimei is protected by a vow David 
had made to the Lord so long as David lives, there is nothing 
to bind Solomon in that matter. Solomon proceeds to murder 
his brother, who has sought the throne but quailed and made 



226 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

submission. He then deals freely with his brother's party. 
The weak hold of religion upon the racially and mentally con- 
fused Hebrews at that time is shown by the ease with which 
he replaces the hostile chief priest by his own adherent Zadok, 
and still more strikingly by the murder of Joab by Benaiah, 
Solomon's chief ruffian, in the tabernacle, while the victim is 
claiming sanctuary and holding to the very horns of Jehovah's 
altar. Then Solomon sets to work, in what was for that time 
a thoroughly modern spirit, to recast the religion of his people. 
He continues the alliance with Hiram, King of Sidon, who 
uses Solomon's kingdom as a high road by which to reach and 
build shipping upon the Eed Sea, and a hitherto unheard of 
wealth accumulates in Jesusalem as a result of this partner 
ship. Gang labour appears in Israel ; Solomon sends relays ol 
men to cut cedarwood in Lebanon under Hiram, and organizes a 
service of porters through the land. (There is much in all 
this to remind the reader of the relations of some Central 
African chief to a European trading concern.) Solomon then 
builds a palace for himself, and a temple not nearly as big for 
Jehovah. Hitherto, the Ark of the Covenant, the divine symbol 
of these ancient Hebrews, had abode in a large tent, which had 
been shifted from one high place to another, and sacrifices had 
been offered to the God of Israel upon a number of different 
high places. Now the ark is brought into the golden splendours 
of the inner chamber of a temple of cedar-sheathed stone, and 
put between two great winged figures of gilded olivewood, and 
sacrifices are henceforth to be made only upon the altar be- 
fore it. 

This centralizing innovation will remind the reader of both 
Akhnaton and Nabonidus. Such things as this are done suc- 
cessfully only when the prestige and tradition and learning 
of the priestly order has sunken to a very low level. 

"And he appointed, according to the order of David his 
father, the courses of the priests to their service, and the 
Levites to their charges, to praise and minister before the priests, 
as the duty of every day required; the porters also by their 
courses at every gate; for so had David the man of God com- 
manded. And they departed not from the commandment of 
the king unto the priest and Levites concerning any matter, or 
concerning the treasures." 

!N"either Solomon's establishment of the worship of Jehovah 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 227 

in Jerusalem Tipon this new footing, nor his vision of and con- 
versation with his God at the opening of his reign, stood in 
the way of his developing a sort of theological ilirtatiousness 
in his declining years. He married widely, if only for reasons 
of state and splendour, and he entertained his numerous wives 
hy sacrificing to their national deities, to the Sidonian god- 
dess Ashtaroth (Ishtar), to Chemosh (a Moabitish god), 
to Moloch, and so forth. The Bible account of Solomon 
does, in fact, show us a king and a confused people, both 
superstitious and mentally unstable, in no way more religious 
than any other people of the surrounding world. 

A point of considerable interest in the story of Solomon, 
because it marks a phase in Egyptian affairs, is his marriage 
to a daughter of Pharaoh. This must have been one of the 
Pharaohs of the XXIst Dynasty. In the great days of Ameno- 
phis III, as the Tel-Amarna letters witness, Pharaoh could con- 
descend to receive a Babylonian princess into his harem, but 
he refused absolutely to grant so divine a creature as an Egyp- 
tian princess in marriage to the Babylonian monarch. It points 
to the steady decline of Egyptian prestige that now, three cen- 
turies later, such a petty monarch as Solomon could wed on 
equal terms with an Egyptian princess. There was, however, 
a revival with the next Egyptian dynasty (XXII) ; and the 
Pharaoh Shishak, the founder, taking advantage of the cleavage 
between Israel and Judah, which had been developing through 
the reigns of both David and Solomon, took Jerusalem and 
looted the all-too-brief splendours both of the new temple and 
of the king's house. 

Shishak seems also to have subjugated Philistia. From this 
time onward it is to be noted that the Philistines fade in im- 
portance. They had already lost their Cretan language and 
adopted that of the Semites they had conquered, and although 
their cities remain more or less independent, they merge grad- 
ually into the general Semitic life of Palestine. 

There is evidence that the original rude but convincing narra- 
tive of Solomon's rule, of his various murders, of his associa- 
tion with Iliram, of his palace and temple building, and the 
extravagances that weakened and finally tore his kingdom in 
twain, has been subjected to extensive interpolations and ex- 
pansions by a later writer, anxious to exaggerate his prosperity 
and glorify his wisdom. It is not the place here to deal with 



228 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the criticism of Bible origins, but it is a matter of ordinary 
common sense rather than of scholarship to note the manifest 
reality and veracity of the main substance of the account of 
David and Solomon, an account explaining sometimes and justi- 
fying sometimes, but nevertheless relating facts, even the harsh- 
est facts, as only a contemporary or almost contemporary writer, 
convinced that they cannot be concealed, would relate them, and 
then to remark the sudden lapse into adulation when the in- 
serted passages occur. It is a striking tribute to the power of the 
written assertion over realities in men's minds that this Bible 
narrative has imposed, not only upon the Christian but upon the 
Moslem world, the belief that King Solomon was not only one 
of the most magnificent, but one of the wisest of men. Yet 
the first book of Kings tells in detail his utmost splendours, and 
beside the beauty and wonder of the buildings and organizations 
of such great monarchs as Thotmes III or Eameses II or half 
a dozen other Pharaohs, or of Sargon II or Sardanapalus or 
Nebuchadnezzar the Great, they are trivial. His temple meas- 
ured internally was twenty cubits broad, about. 35 feet ^ — that 
is, the breadth of a small villa residence — and sixty cubits, say 
100 feet, long. And as for his wisdom and statescraft, one 
need go no further than the Bible to see that Solomon was a 
mere helper in the wide-reaching schemes of the trader-king 
Hiram, and his kingdom a pawn between Pha?nicia and Egypt. 
His importance was due largely to the temporary enfeeblement 
of Egypt, which encouraged the ambition of the Phoenician 
and made it necessary to propitiate the holder of the key to 
an alternate trade route to the East. To his own people 
Solomon was a wasteful and oppressive monarch, and already 
before his death his kingdom was splitting, visibly to all 
men. 

With the reign of King Solomon the brief glory of the He- 
brews ends; the northern and richer section of his kingdom, 
long oppressed by taxation to sustain his splendours, breaks off 
from Jerusalem to become the separate kingdom of Israel, and 
this split ruptures that linking connection between Sidon and 
the Bed Sea by which Solomon's gleam of wealth was possible. 
There is no more wealth in Hebrew history. Jerusalem re- 
mains the capital of one tribe, the tribe of Judah, the capital 

* Estimates of the cubit vary. The greatest is 44 inches. This would 
extend the width to seventy-odd feet. 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 229 

of a land of barren hills, cut off by Philistia from the sea and 
surrounded by enemies. 

The tale of wars, of religious conflicts, of usurpations, as- 
sassinations, and of fratricidal murders to secure the throne 
goes on for three centuries. It is a tale frankly barbaric. Israel 
wars with Judah and the neighbouring states; forms alliances 
first with one and then with the other. The power of Aramean 
Syria bums like a baleful star over the affairs of the Hebrews, 
and then there rises behind it the great and growing power of 
the last Assyrian empire. For three centuries the life of the 
Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon living in 
the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being 
run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries. 

"Pul" (apparently the same person as Tiglath Pileser III) 
is, according to the Bible narrative, the first Assyrian monarch 
to appear upon the Hebrew horizon, and Menahem buys him 
off with a thousand talents of silver (738 B.C.). But the power 
of Assyria is heading straight for the now aged and decadent 
land of Egypt, and the line of attack lies through Judea ; Tiglath 
Pileser III returns and Shahnaneser follows in his steps, the 
King of Israel intrigues for help with Egypt, that "broken 
reed," and in 721 b.c, as we have already noted, his kingdom 
is swept off into captivity and utterly lost to history. The same 
fate hung over Judah, but for a little while it was averted. The 
fate of Sennacherib's army in the reign of King Hezekiah (701 
B.'c), and how he was murdered by his sons (II. Kings xix. 37), 
we have already mentioned. The subsequent subjugation of 
Egypt by Assyria finds no mention in Holy Writ, but it is 
clear that before the reign of Sennacherib, King Hezekiah had 
carried on a diplomatic correspondence with Babylon (700 
B.C.), which was in revolt against Sargon II of Assyria. There 
followed the conquest of Egypt by Esarhaddon, and then for a 
time Assyria was occupied with her own troubles ; the Scythians 
and Medes and Persians were pressing her on the north, and 
Babylon was in insurrection. As we have already noted, Egypt, 
relieved for a time from Assyrian pressure, entered upon a 
phase of revival, first under Psammetichus and then under 
Necho 11. 

Again the little country in between made mistakes in its 
alliances. But on neither side was there safety. Josiah op- 
posed Necho, and was slain at the battle of Megiddo (608 b.c). 



230 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The king of Judah became an Egyptian tributary. Then when 
Necho, after pushing as far as the Euphrates, fell before 
Nebuchadnezzar II, Judah fell with him (604 b.c). Nebuchad- 
nezzar, after a trial of three puppet kings, carried off the greater 
part of the people into captivity in Babylon (586 b.c), and the 
rest, after a rising and a massacre of Babylonian officials, took 
refuge from the vengeance of Chaldea in Eg^v'pt. 

''And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and 
the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the 
king, and of his princes ; all these he brought to Babylon. And 
they burnt the house of God and brake down the wall of Jerusa- 
lem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed 
all the goodly vessels thereof. And them that had escaped from 
the sword carried he away to Babylon ; where they were servants 
to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia." 
(II. Chron. xxxvi. 18, 19, 20.) 

So the four centuries of Hebrew kingship comes to an end. 
From first to last it was a mere incident in the larger and greater 
history of Egypt, Syria, Assyria, and Phoenicia. But out of 
it there were now to arise moral and intellectual consequences 
of primary importance to all mankind. 

§ 3 

The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two 
generations, to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus 
were a very different people from the warring Baal worshippers 
and Jehovah worshippers, the sacrificers in the high places and 
sacrificers at Jerusalem of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. 
The plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews went to 
Babylon barbarians and came back civilized. They went a 
confused and divided multitude, with no national self-con- 
sciousness; they came back with an intense and exclusive na- 
tional spirit. They went with no common literature generally 
known to them, for it was only about forty years before the 
captivity that King Josiah is said to have discovered "a book of 
the law" in the temple (II. Kings xxii), and, besides that, 
there is not a hint in the record of any reading of books ; and 
they returned with most of their material for the Old Testa- 
ment. It is manifest that, relieved of their bickering and mur- 
derous kings, restrained from politics and in the intellectually 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 231 

stimulating atmosphere of that Babylonian world, the Jewish 
mind made a great step forward during the Captivity. 

It was an age of historical inquiry and learning in Baby- 
lonia. The Babylonian influences that had made Sardanapalus 
collect a great library of ancient writings in Nineveh were still 
at work. We have already told how N^abonidus was so pre- 
occupied with antiquarian research as to neglect the defence of 
his kingdom against Cyrus. Everything, therefore, contributed 
to set the exiled Jews inquiring into their own history, and they 
found an inspiring leader in the prophet Ezekiel. From such 
hidden and forgotten records as they had with them, genealogies, 
contemporary histories of David, Solomon, and their other kings, 
legends and traditions, they made out and amplified their own 
story, and told it to Babylon and themselves. The story of the 
Creation and the Flood, much of the story of Moses, much of 
Samson, were probably incorporated from Babylonian sources.^ 
When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, only the Pentateuch had 
been put together into one book, but the grouping of the rest 
of the historical books was bound to follow. 

The rest of their literature remained for some centuries as 
separate books, to which a very variable amount of respect was 
paid. Some of the later books are frankly post-captivity com- 
positions. Over all this literature were thrown certain leading 
ideas. There was an idea, which even these books themselves 
gainsay in detail, that all the people were pure-blooded children 
of Abraham ; there was next an idea of a promise made by 
Jehovah to Abraham that he v/ould exalt the Jewish race above 
all other races; and, thirdly, there was the belief first of all 
that Jehovah was the greatest and most powerful of tribal gods, 
and then that he was a god above all other gods, and at last 
that he was the only true god. The Jews became convinced 
at last, as a people, that they were the chosen people of the 
one God of all the earth. 

And arising very naturally out of these three ideas, was a 
fourth, the idea of a coming leader, a saviour, a Messiah who 
would realize the long-postponed promises of Jehovah. 

This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented 
people in the course of the ^'seventy years" is the first instance 

* But one version of the Creation story and the Eden story, though 
originally from Babvlon, seem to have been known to the Hebrews before 
the exile.— G. W. B. 



232 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

in history of the new power of the written word in human 
affairs. It was a mental consolidation that did much more than 
unite the people who returned to Jerusalem. This idea of be- 
longing to a chosen race predestined to pre-eminence was a very 
attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who remained in 
Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established 
in Egypt. It affected the mixed people who had been placed 
in Samaria, the old capital of the kings of Israel when the ten 
tribes were deported to Media. It inspired a great number 
of Babylonians and the like to claim Abraham as their father, 
and thrust their company upon the returning Jews. Am- 
monites and Moabites became adherents. The book of Nehe- 
miah is full of the distress occasioned by this invasion of the 
privileges of the chosen. The Jews were already a people dis- 
persed in many lands and cities, when their minds and hopes 
were unified and they became an exclusive people. But at first 
their exclusiveness is merely to preserve soundness of doctrine 
and worship, warned by such lamentable lapses as those of King 
Solomon. To genuine proselytes of whatever race, Judaism 
long held out welcoming arms. 

To Phoenicians after the falls of Tyre and Carthage, con- 
version to Judaism must have been particularly easy and at- 
tractive. Their language was closely akin to Hebrew. It is 
possible that the great majority of African and Spanish Jews 
are really of Phoenician origin. There were also great Arabian 
accessions. In South Russia, as we shall note later, there were 
even Mongoliaji Jews. 

§ 4 

The historical books from Genesis to Nehemiah, upon which 
the idea of the promise to the chosen people had been imposed 
later, were no doubt the backbone of Jewish mental unity, but 
they by no means complete the Hebrew literature from which 
finally the Bible was made up. Of such books as Job, said to be 
an imitation of Greek tragedy, the Song of Solomon, the 
Psalms, Proverbs, and others, there is no time to write in this 
Outline, but it is necessary to deal with the books known as 
"the Prophets" with some fullness. For those books are almost 
the earliest and certainly the best evidence of the appearance 
of a new kind of leading in human affairs. 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 233 

These prophets are not a new class in the community; they 
are of the most various origins — Ezekiel was of the priestly 
caste and of priestly sympathies, and Amos was a shepherd; 
but they have this ir. common, that they bring into life a re- 
ligious force outside the sacrifices and formalities of priesthood 
and temple. The earlier prophets seem most like the earlier 
priests, they are oracular, they give advice and foretell events ; 
it is quite possible that at first, in the days when there were 
many high places in the land and religious ideas were com- 
paratively unsettled, there was no great distinction between 
priest and prophet. The prophets danced, it would seem, some- 
what after the Dervish fashion, and uttered oracles. Generally 
they wore a distinctive mantle of rough goatskin. They kept 
up the nomadic tradition as against the ''new ways" of the set- 
tlement. But after the building of the temple and the organi- 
zation of the priesthood the prophetic type remains over and 
outside the formal religious scheme. They were probably al- 
ways more or less of an annoyance to the priests. They became 
informal advisers upon public affairs, denouncers of sin and 
strange practices, ''self-constituted," as we should say, having 
no sanction but an inner light. "Now the word of the Lord 
came unto" — so and so; that is the formula. 

In the latter and most troubled days of the kingdom of Judah, 
as Egypt, North Arabia, Assyria, and then Babylonia closed 
like a vice upon the land, these prophets became very significant 
and powerful. Their appeal was to anxious and fearful minds, 
and at first their exhortation was chiefly towards repentance, 
the pulling down of this or that high place, the restoration of 
worship in Jerusalem, or the like. But through som© of the 
prophecies there runs already a note like the note of what we 
call nowadays a "social reformer." The rich are "grinding the 
faces of the poor" ; the luxurious are consuming the children's 
bread ; influential and wealthy people make friends with and 
imitate the splendours and vices of foreigners, and sacrifice the 
common people to these new fashions ; and this is hateful to 
Jehovah, who will certainly punish the land. 

But with the broadening of ideas that came with the Cap- 
tivity, the tenor of prophecy broadens and changes. The jealous 
pettiness that disfigures the earlier tribal ideas of God gives 
place to a new idea of a god of universal righteousness. It is 
clear that the increasing influence of prophets was not confined 



234 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to the Jewish people; it was something that was going on in 
those days all over the Semitic world. The breaking down of 
nations and kingdoms to form the great and changing empires 
of that age, the smashing up of cults and priesthoods, the mutual 
discrediting of temple by temple in their rivalries and disputes 
— all these influences were releasing men's minds to a freer and 
wider religious outlook. The temples had accumulated great 
stores of golden vessels and lost their hold upon the imaginations 
of men. It is difficult to estimate whether, amidst these con- 
stant wars, life had become more uncertain and unhappy than 
it had ever been before, but there can be no doubt that men 
had become more conscious of its miseries and insecurities. 
Except for the weak and the women, there remained little com- 
fort or assurance in the sacrifices, ritual, and formal devotions 
of the temples. Such was the world to which the later prophets 
of Israel began to talk of the One God, and of a Promise that 
some day the world should come to peace and unity and happi- 
ness. This great God that men were now discovering lived in a 
temple "not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." There 
can be little doubt of a great body of such thought and utter- 
ance in Babylonia, Egypt, and throughout the Semitic east. 
The prophetic books of the Bible can be but specimens of the 
prophesyings of that time. . . . 

We have already drawn attention to the gradual escape of 
writing and knowledge from their original limitation to the 
priesthood and the temple precincts, from the shell in which 
they were first developed and cherished. We have taken Herod- 
otus as an interesting specimen of what we have called the free 
intelligence of mankind. Now here we are dealing with a 
similar overflow of moral ideas into the general community. 
The Hebrew prophets, and the steady expansion of their ideas 
towards one God in all the world, is a parallel development of 
the free conscience of mankind. From this time onward there 
runs through human thought, now weakly and obscurely, now 
gathering power, the idea of one rule in the world, and of a 
promise and possibility of an active and splendid peace and 
happiness in human affairs. From being a temple religion 
of the old type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a large extent, 
a prophetic and creative religion of a new type. Prophet suc- 
ceeds prophet. Later on, as we shall tell, there was bom a 
prophet of unprecedented power, Jesus, whose followers founded 



THE SCRIPTURES AND THE PROPHETS 235 

the gi-eat universal religion of Christianity. Still later Mu- 
hammad, another prophet, appears in Arahia and founds Islam. 
In spite of very distinctive features of their own, these two 
teachers do in a manner arise out of and in succession to these 
Jewish prophets. It is not the place of the historian to discuss 
the truth and falsity of religion, hut it is his business to record 
the appearance of great constructive ideas. Two thousand four 
hundred years ago, and six or seven or eight thousand years 
after the walls of the first Simierian cities arose, the ideas of 
the moral unity of mankind and of a world peace had come 
into the world. ^ 

^Fletcher H. Swift's Education in Ancient Israel from Earliest Times to 
A.D. 70 is an interesting account of the way in which the Jewish religion, 
because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to the first efforts to 
provide elementary education for all the children in the community. 



XX 

THE AKYAI^-SPEAKING PEOPLES m PKE- 
HISTORIC TIMES 

1. The Spreading of the Aryan-Speakers. § 2. Prirmtive 
Aryan Life. § 3. Early Aryan Daily Life. 



WE have spoken of the Aryan language as probably aris- 
ing in the region of the Danube and South Russia and 
spreading from that region of origin. We say "prob- 
ably," because it is by no means certainly proved that that w^as 
the centre; there have been vast discussions upon this point 
and wide divergences of opinion. We give the prevalent view. 
It was originally the language of a group of peoples of the 
Nordic race. As it spread widely, Aryan began to differentiate 
into a number of subordinate languages. To the west and south 
it encountered the Basque language, which was then widely 
spread in Spain, and also possibly various other Mediterranean 
languages. 

Before the spreading of the Aryans from their lands of 
origin southward and westward, the Iberian race was dis- 
tributed over Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, north 
Africa, south Italy, and, in a more civilized state, Greece and 
Asia Minor. It was closely related to the Egyptian. To judge 
by its European vestiges it was a rather small human type, 
generally with an oval face and a long head. It buried its 
chiefs and important people in megalithic chambers — i.e. made 
of big stones — covered over by great mounds of earth ; and these 
mounds of earth, being much longer than they are broad, are 
spoken of as the long barrows. These people sheltered at times 
in caves, and also buried some of their dead therein ; and from 
the traces of charred, broken, and cut human bones, including 
the bones of children, it is inferred that they were cannibals. 

236 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 



237 




238 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

These short dark Iberian tribes (and the Bascjues also if they 
were a different race) were thrust back westward, and con- 
quered and enslaved by slowly advancing waves of the taller 
and fairer Aryan-speaking people, coming southward and west- 
ward through Central Europe, who are spoken of as the Kelts. 
Only the Basque resisted the conquering Aryan speech. Grad- 
ually these Keltic-speakers made their way to the Atlantic, and 
all that now remains of the Iberians is mixed into the Keltic 
population. How far the Keltic invasion affected the Irish 
population is a matter of debate at the present time; in that 
island the Kelts may have been a mere caste of conquerors 
who imposed their language on a larger subject population. It 
is even doubtful if the north of England is more Aryan than 
pre-Keltic in blood. There is a sort of short dark Welshman, 
and certain types of Irishmen, who are Iberians by race. The 
modern Portuguese are also largely of Iberian blood. 

The Kelts spoke a language, Keltic,^ which was also in its 
turn to differentiate into the language of Gaul, Welsh, Breton, 
Scotch and Irish Gaelic, and other tongues. They buried the 
ashes of their chiefs and important people in round barrows. 
While these !N^ordic Kelts were spreading westward, other 
Nordic Aryan peoples were pressing down upon the dark white 
Mediterranean race in the Italian and Greek peninsulas, and 
developing the Latin and Greek groups of tongues. Certain 
other Aryan tribes were drifting towards the Baltic and across 
into Scandinavia, speaking varieties of the Aryan which be- 
came ancient Norse — the parent of Swedish, Danish, Nor- 
wegian, and Icelandic — Gothic, and Low and High German. 

While the primitive Aryan speech was thus spreading and 
breaking up into daughter languages to the west, it was also 
spreading and breaking up to the east. North of the Car- 
pathians and the Black Sea, Aryan-speaking tribes were in- 
creasing and spreading and using a distinctive dialect called 
Slavonian, from which came Russian, Serbian, Polish, Bul- 
garian, and other tongues ; other variations of Aryan distributed 
over Asia Minor and Persia were also being individualized as 
Armenian and Indo-Iranian, the parent of Sanscrit and 
Persian. In this book we have used the word Aryan for all 

^ "The Keltic group of languages, of which it has been said that they 
combined an Aryan vocabulary with a Berber (or Iberian) grammar." 
— Sir Harry Johnston. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 239 

this family of languages, but the term Indo-European is some- 
times used for the entire family, and "Aryan" itself restricted 
in a narrower sense to the Indo-Iranian speech. This Indo- 
Iranian speech was destined to split later into a number of 
languages, including Persian and Sanscrit, the latter being the 
language of certain tribes of fair-complexioned Aryan speakers 
who pushed eastward into India somewhen between 3,000 and 
1,000 B.C. and conquered dark Dravidian peoples who were 
then in possession of that land. 

From their original range of wandering, other Aryan 
tribes spread to the north as well as to the south of the Black 
Sea, and ultimately, as these seas shrank and made way 
for them, to the north and east of the Caspian, and so 
began to come into conflict with and mix also with Mongolian 
peoples of the Ural-Altaic linguistic gi-oup the horse-keeping 
people of the grassy steppes of Central Asia. From these Mon- 
golian races the Aryans seem to have acquired the use of the 
horse for riding and warfare. There were three or four pre- 
historic varieties or sub-species of horse in Europe and Asia, 
but it was the steppe or semi-desert lands that first gave horses 
of a build adapted to other than food uses.^ All these peoples, 
it must be understood, shifted their gi-ound rapidly, a succesr 
sion of bad seasons might drive them many hundreds of miles, 
and it is only in a very rough and provisional manner that their 
''beats" can now be indicated. Every summer they went north, 
every winter they swung south again. This annual swing cov- 
ered sometimes hundreds of miles. On our maps, for the sake 
of simplicity, w^e represent the shifting of nomadic peoples by 
a straight line ; but really they moved in annual swings, as the 
broom of a servant who is sweeping out a passage swishes from 
side to side as she advances. Spreading round the north of the 
Black Sea, and pi'obably to the north of the Caspian, from 
the range of the original Teutonic tribes of Central and JSTorth- 
central Europe to the Iranian peoples who became the Modes 
and Persians and (Aryan) Hindus, were the grazing lands 
of a confusion of tribes, about whom it is truer to be vagTie than 
precise, such as the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, and those 
Scythians who, together with the Medes and Persians, came into 
effective contact with the Assyrian Empire by 1,000 B.C. or 
earlier. 

* Roger Pocock's Ilorses is a good and readable book on these questions. 



240 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

East and south of the Black Sea, between the Danulae and 
the Medes and Persians, and to the north of the Semitic and 
Mediterranean peoples of the sea-coasts and peninsulas, ranged 
another series of equally ill-defined Aryan tribes, moving easily 
from place to place and intermixing freely — to the great con- 
fusion of historians. They seem, for instance, to have broken 
up and assimilated the Hittite civilization, which was probably 
pre-Aryan in its origin. These latter Aryans were, perhaps, 
not so far advanced along the nomadic line as the Scythians of 
the great plains. 



What sort of life did these prehistoric Aryans lead, these 
Nordic Aryans who were the chief ancestors of most Europeans 
and most white Americans and European colonists of to-day, 
as well as of the Armenians,^ Persians, and high-caste Hindus? 

In answering that question in addition to the dug-up remains 
and vestiges upon which we have had to rely in the case of the 
predecessors of the Aryans, we have a new source of knowledge. 
We have language. By careful study of the Aryan languages 
it has been found possible to deduce a number of conclusions 
about the life of these Aryan peoples 5,000 or 4,000 years ago. 
All these languages have a common resemblance, as each, as 
we have already explained, rings the changes upon a number 
of common roots. When we find the same root word running 
through all or most of these tongues, it seems reasonable to 
conclude that the thing that root word signifies must have been 
kno\\Ti to the common ancestors. Of course, if they have ex- 
actly the same word in their languages, this may not be the 
case; it may be the new name of a new thing or of a new idea 
that has spread over the world quite recently. "Gas," for 
instance, is a word that was made by Van Helmont, a Dutch 
chemist, about 1625, and has spread into most civilized tongues, 
and "tobacco" again is an American-Indian word which fol- 
lowed the introduction of smoking almost everywhere. But if 
the same word turns up in a number of languages, and if it 
follows the characteristic modifications of each language, we 
may feel sure that it has been in that language, and a part of 
that language, since the beginning, suffering the same changes 

^ But these may have been an originally Semitic people who learnt an 
Aryan speech. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 241 

witL the rest of it. We know, for example, that the words for 
waggon and wheel run in this fashion through the Aryan 
tongues, and so we are able to conclude that the primitive 
Aryans, the more purely Nordic Aryans, had waggons, though 
it would seem from the absence of any common roots for spokes, 
rim, or axle that their wheels were not wheelwright's wheels 
with spokes, but made of the trunks of trees shaped out with 
an axe between the ends. 

These primitive waggons were drawn by oxen. The early 
Aryans did not ride or drive horses ; they had very little to do 
with horses. The Reindeer men were a horse-people, but the 
Neolithic Aryans were a cow-people. They ate beef, not horse ; 
and after many ages they began this use of draught cattle. 
They reckoned wealth by cows. They wandered, following 
pasture, and "trekking" their goods, as the South African Boers 
do, in ox-waggons, though of course their waggons were much 
clumsier than any to be found in the world to-day. They prob- 
ably ranged over very wide areas. They were migratory, but 
not in the strict sense of the word "nomadic" ; they moved in a 
slower, clumsier fashion than did the later, more specialized 
nomadic peoples. They were forest and parkland people with- 
out horses. They were developing a migTatory life out of the 
more settled "forest clearing-" life of the earlier ISTeolithic 
period. Changes of climate which were replacing forest by 
pasture, and the accidental burning of forests by fire, may have 
assisted this development. 

We have already described the sort of home the primitive 
Aryan occupied and his household life, so far as the remains 
of the Swiss pile dwellings enable us to describe these things. 
Mostly his houses were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle 
and mud, to have survived, and possibly he left them and 
trekked on for very slight reasons. The Aryan peoples burnt 
their dead, a custom they still preserve in India, but their 
predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried their 
dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial 
mounds (round barrows) the urns containing the ashes of the 
departed are shaped like houses, and these represent rounded 
huts with thatched roofs. (See Fig., page 86.) 

The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important 
to him than his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough 
wooden hoe ; then, after he had found out the use of cattle for 



242 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

draught purposes, he began real ploughing with oxen, using 
at first a suitably bent tree bough as his plough. His first 
cultivation before that came about must have been rather in 
the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of 
fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land 
on which the cattle grazed together. 

He never used stc'-ie for building house walls until upon 
the very verge of history. He used stone for hearths (e. g. at 
Glastonbury), and sometimes stone sub-structures. He did, 
however, make a sort of stone house in the centre of the great 
mounds in which he buried the ashes of his illustrious dead. 
He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian neighbours 
and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic 
culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible 
for such temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany. 

These Aryans were congregated not in cities but in districts 
of pasturage, as clans and tribal communities. They formed 
loose leagues of mutual help under chosen leaders, they had 
centres where they could come together with their cattle in 
times of danger, and they made camps with walls of earth and 
palisades, many of which are still to be traced in the history- 
worn contours of the European scenery. The leaders under 
whom men fought in war were often the same men as the sacri- 
ficial purifiers who were their early priests. 

The knowledge of bronze spread late in Europe. The Nordic 
European had been making his slow advances age by age for 
7,000 or 8,000 years before the metals came. By that time 
his social life had developed so that there were men of various 
occupations and men and women of different ranks in the com- 
munity. There were men who worked wood and leather, pot- 
ters and carvers. The women span and wove and embroidered. 
There were chiefs and families that were distinguished as 
leaderly and noble. The Aryan tribesman varied the monotony 
of his herding and wandering, he consecrated undertakings and 
celebrated triumphs, held funeral assemblies, and distingiiished 
the traditional seasons of the year, by feasts. His meats we 
have already glanced at ; he was an eager user of intoxicating 
drinks. He made these of honey, of barley, and, as the Aryan- 
speaking tribes spread southward, of the grape. And he got 
merry and drunken. Whether he first used yeast to make his 
bread light or to ferment his drink we do not know. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 243 

At his feasts there were individuals with a gift for "playing 
the fool," who did so no doubt to win the laughter of their 
friends, but there was also another sort of men, of great im- 
portance in their time, and still more important to the historian, 
certain singers of songs and stories, the bards or rhapsodists. 
These hards existed among all the Aryan-speaking peoples ; they 
were a consequence of and a further factor in that development 
of spoken language which was the chief of all the human ad- 
vances made in Neolithic times. They chanted or recited stories 
of the past, or stories of the living chief and his people ; they told 
other stories that they invented; they memorized jokes and 
catches. They found and seized upon and improved the 
rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, and such-like possibilities latent 
in language; they probably did much to elaborate and fix gram- 
matical forms. They were the first great artists of the ear, as 
the later Aurignacian rock painters were the first great artists 
of the eye and hand. JSTo doubt they used much gesture ; prob- 
ably they learnt appropriate gestures when they learnt their 
songs ; but the order and sweetness and power of language was 
their primary concern. 

And they mark a new step forward in the power and range 
of the human mind. They sustained and developed in men's 
minds a sense of a greater something than themselves, the tribe, 
and of a life that extended back into the past. They not only 
recalled old hatreds and battJes, they recalled old alliances and 
a common inheritance. The feats of dead heroes lived again. 
The Aryans began to live in thought before they were born 
and after they were dead. 

Like most human things, this bardic tradition grew first 
slowly and then more rapidly. By the time bronze was coming 
into Europe there was not an Aryan people that had not a 
profession and training of bards. In their hands language 
became as beautiful as it is ever likely tc be. These bards were 
living books, man-histories, guardians and makers of a new 
and more powerful tradition in human life. Every Aryan peo- 
ple had its long poetical records thus handed down, its sagas 
(Teutonic), its epics (Greek), its vedas (Old Sanscrit). The 
earliest Aryan people were essentially a people of the voice. The 
recitation seems to have predominated even in those ceremonial 
and dramatic dances and that "dressing-up" which among most 
human races have also served for the transmission of tradition. 



244 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

At that time there was no writing, and when first the art 
of writing crept into Europe, as we shall tell later, it must 
have seemed far too slow, clumsy, and lifeless a method of 
record for men to trouble very much about writing down these 
glowing and beautiful treasures of the memory. Writing was 
at first kept for accounts and matters of fact. The bards and 
rhapsodists flourished for long after the introduction of writing. 
They survived, indeed, in Europe as the minstrels into the 
Middle Ages. 

Unhappily their tradition had not the fixity of a written 
record. They amended and reconstructed, they had their 
fashions and their phases of negligence. Accordingly we have 
now only the very much altered and revised vestiges of that 
spoken literature of prehistoric times. One of the most inter- 
esting and informing of these prehistoric compositions of the 
Aryans survives in the Greek Iliad. An early form of Iliad 
was probably recited by 1,000 b.c.^ but it was not written down 
until perhaps 700 or 600 b.c. Many men must have had to do 
with it as authors and improvers, but later Greek tradition 
attributed it to a blind bard named Homer, to whom also is 
ascribed the Odyssey, a composition of a very different spirit 
and outlook. It is possible that many of the Aryan bards were 
blind men. According to Professor J. L. Myres their bards 
were blinded to prevent their straying from the tribe. Mr. 
L. Lloyd has seen in Rhodesia the musician of a troupe of 
native dancers who had been blinded by his chief for this very 
reason. The Slavs called all bards sliepac, which was also their 
word for a blind man. The original recited version of the Iliad 
was older than that of the Odyssey. "The Iliad as a complete 
poem is older than the Odyssey, though the material of the 
Odyssey, being largely undatable folk-lore, is older than any of 
the historical material in the Iliad." Both epics were prob- 
ably written over and rewritten at a later date, in much the 
same manner that Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Queen 
Victoria, in his Idylls of the King, wrote over the Morte 
d'Arthur (which was itself a writing over by Sir Thomas 
Malory, circ. 1450, of pre-existing legends), making the 
speeches and sentiments and the characters more in accordance 
with those of his own time. But the events of the Iliad and the 
Odyssey, the way of living they describe, the spirit of the acts 
recorded, belong to the closing centuries of the prehistoric age. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 245 

These sagas, epics, and vedas do supply, in addition to archseol- 
ogy and philology, a third source of information about those 
vanished times. 

Here, for example, is tho concluding passage of the Iliad, 
describing very exactly the making of a prehistoric barrow. 
(We have taken here Chapman's rhymed translation, correct- 
ing certain words with the help of the prose version of Lang, 
Leaf, and Myers.) 

"... Thus oxen, mules, in waggons straight they put, 
Went forth, and an unmcasur'd pile of sylvan matter cut; 
Nine days employ'd in carriage, but when the tenth morn shin'd 
On wretched mortals, then they brought the bravest of his kind 
Forth to be burned. Troy swam in tears. Upon the pile's most height 
They laid the body, and gave fire. All day it burn'd, all night. 
But when th' elev'nth morn let on earth her rosy fingers shine, 
The people flock'd about the pile, and first with gleaming wine 
Quench'd all the flames. His brothers then, and friends, the snowy 

bones 
Gather'd into an urn of gold, still pouring out their moans. 
Then wrapt they in soft purple veils the rich urn, digg'd a pit, 
Grav'd it, built up the grave with stones, and quickly piled on it 
A barrow. . . . 

. . . The barrow heap'd once, all the town 

In Jove-nurs'd Priam's Court partook a sumptuous fun'ral feast, 
And so horse-taming Hector's rites gave up his soul to rest." 

There remains also an old English saga, Beowulf, made long 
before the English had crossed from Gei-many into England, 
which winds up with a similar burial. The preparation of a 
pyre is first described. It is hung round with shields and coats 
of mail. The body is brought and the pyre fired, and then for 
ten days the warriors built a mighty mound to be seen afar 
by the traveller on sea or land. Beounilf, which is at least a 
thousand years later than the Iliad, is also interesting because 
one of the main adventures in it is the looting of the treasures 
of a barrow already ancient in those days. 



The Greek epics reveal the early Greeks with no knowledge 
of iron, without writing, and before any Greek-founded cities 
existed in the land into which they had evidently come quite 
recently as conquerors. They were spreading southward from 



24G 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



the Aryan region of origin. They seem to have been a fair peo- 
ple, new-comers in Greece, new-comers to a hmd that had been 
held hitherto by the Mediterranean or Iberian peoples. 

Let us, at the risk cf a slight repetition, be perfectly clear 
upon one point. The Iliad does not give us the primitive neo- 
lithic life of that Aryan region of origin; it gives us that life 
already well on the move towards a new state of affairs. The 
primitive neolithic way of living, with its tame and domesti- 
cated animals, its pottery and cooking, and its transitory patches 
of rude cultivation, we have already sketched. Between 15,000 

and 6,000 B.C. the 
neolithic way of liv- 
ing had spread with 
the forests and abun- 
dant vegetation of the 
Pluvial Period, over 
the gi-eater part of the 
old world, from the 
!Niger to the Hwang- 
ho and from Ireland 
to the south of India. 
Now, as the climate 
of great portions of 
the earth was swing- 
ing towards drier and 
more open conditions 
a g a i n, t h e earlier, 
simpler, neolithic life 
was developing along 
two divergent directions. One waS leading to a more wander- 
ing life, towards at last a constantly migratory life between 
summer and winter pasture, which is called Nomadism ; the 
other, in certain sunlit river valleys, was towards a water-treas- 
uring life of irrigation, in which men gathered into the first 
towns and made the first Civilization. We have already de- 
scribed the first civilizations and their liability to recurrent 
conquests by nomadic peoples. We have already noted that for 
many thousands of years there has been an almost rhythmic re- 
currence of conquest of the civilizations by the nomads. Here we 
have to note that the Greeks, as the Iliad presents them, are 
neither simple neolithic nomads, innocent of civilization, nor are 




^ambst tchyccniVfcnciaiiS- &" Hcctyc [ in tlia Iliajl) 

From a platter ascribed to the end of the 
seventh century in the British Museum. This 
is probably the earliest known vase bearing a 
Greek inscription. Greek writing was just be- 
ginning. Note the Swastika. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 



247 



they civilized men. They are nomads in an excited state, be- 
cause they have just come upon civilization, and regard it as an 
opportunity for war and loot. 

These early Greeks of the Iliad are sturdy fighters, but with- 
out discipline^ — their battles are a confusion of single combats. 
They have horses, but no cavalry ; they use the horse, which is 
a comparatively recent addition to Aryan resources, to drag a 
rude fighting chariot into battle. The horse is still novel enough 
to be something of a terror in itself. For ordinary draught pur- 
poses, as in the quo- 



mmmmmkWBmwmmsimmm 




Horses & (^laziois- — 

(Srarrh an. archaic (jrizek vase) 



tation from the Iliad 
we have just made, 
oxen were employed. 

The only priests of 
these Aryans are the 
keepers of shrines 
and sacred places. 
There are chiefs, who 
are heads of families 
and who also perform 
sacrifices, but there 
does not seem to be 
much mystery or sac- 
ramental feeling in 

their religion. When the Greeks go to war, these heads and 
elders meet in council and appoint a king, whose powers are 
very loosely defined. There are no laws, but only customs; 
and no exact standards of conduct. 

The social life of the early Greeks centred about the house- 
holds of these leading men. There were no doubt huts for herds 
and the like, and outlying farm buildings; but the hall of 
the chief was a comprehensive centre, to which everyone went 
to feast, to hear the bards, to take part in games and exercises. 
The primitive craftsmen were gathered there. About it were 
cowsheds and stabling and such-like offices. Unimportant peo- 
ple slept about anywhere as retainers did in the mediaeval castles 
and as people still do in Indian households. Except for quite 
personal possessions, there was still an air of patriarchal com- 
munism about the tribe. The tribe, or the chief as the head of the 
tribe, owned the grazing lands ; forest and rivers were the wild. 

The Arvan social organization seems, and indeed all early 



248 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

communities seem, to have been without the little separate 
households that make up the mass of the population in western 
Europe or America to-day. The tribe was a big family; the 
nation a group of tribal families ; a household often contained 
hundreds of people. Human society began, just as herds 
and droves begin among animals, by the family delaying its 
breaking up. Nowadays the lions in East Africa are apparently 
becoming social animals in this way, by the young keeping with 
the mother after they are fully grown, and hunting in a group. 
Hitherto the lion has been much more of a solitary beast. If 
men and women do not cling to their families nowadays as 
much as they did, it is because the state and the community 
supply now safety and help and facilities that were once only 
possible in the family group. 

In the Hindu community of to-day these great households 
of the earlier stages cf human society are still to be found. Mr. 
Bhupendranath Basu has recently described a typical Hindu 
household.-^ It is an Aryan household refined and made gentle 
by thousands of years of civilization, but its social structure 
is the same as that of the households of which the Aryan epics 
tell. 

"The joint family system/' he said, "has descended to us from 
time immemorial, the Aryan patriarchal system of old still 
holding sway in India. The structure, though ancient, remains 
full of life. The joint family is a co-operative corporation, in 
which men and women have a well-defined place. At the head 
of the corporation is the senior member of the family, generally 
the eldest male member, but in his absence the senior female 
member often assumes control." (Cp. Penelope in the 
Odyssey.) 

"All able-bodied members must contribute their labour and 
earnings, whether of personal skill or agriculture and trade, to 
the common stock ; weaker members, widows, orphans, and desti- 
tute relations, all must be maintained and supported; sons, 
nephews, brothers, cousins, all must be treated equally, for any 
undue preference is apt to break up the family. We have no 
word for cousins — ^they are either brothers or sisters, and we 
do not know what are cousins two degrees removed. The chil- 
dren of a first cousin are your nephews and nieces, just the same 

^ Some Aspects of Hindu Life in India. Paper read to the Royal Society 
f Arts, Nov. 28, 1918. 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 249 

as the children of your brothers and sisters. A man can no 
more marry a cousin, however removed, than he can marry 
his own sister, except in certain parts of Madras, where a man 
may marry his maternal uncle's daughter. The family affec- 
tions, the family ties, are always very strong, and therefore 
the maintenance of an equal standard among so many members 
is not so difficult as it may appear at first sight. Moreover, 
life is very simple. Until recently shoes were not in general 
use at home, but sandals without any leather fastenings. I 
have known of a well-to-do middle-class family of several 
brothers and cousins who had two or three pairs of leather shoes 
between them, these shoes being only used when they had occa- 
sion to go out, and the same practice is still followed in the case 
of the more expensive garments, like shawls, which last for 
generations, and with their age are treated with loving care, as 
having been used by ancestors of revered memory. 

"The joint family remains together sometimes for several 
generations, until it becomes too unwieldy, when it breaks up 
into smaller families, and you thus see whole villages peopled 
by members of the same clan. I have said that the family is a 
co-operative society, and it may be likened to a small state, and 
is kept in its place by strong discipline based on love and obedi- 
ence. You see nearly every day the younger members coming 
to the head of the family and taking the dust of his feet as a 
token of benediction ; whenever they go on an enterprise, they 
take his leave and carry his blessing. . . . There are many 
bonds which bind the family together — the bonds of sympathy, 
of common pleasures, of common sorrows ; when a death occurs, 
all the members go into mourning; when there is a birth or a 
wedding, the whole family rejoices. Then above all is the 
family deity, some image of Vishnu, the preserver; his place 
is in a separate room, generally known as the room of God, or 
in well-to-do families in a temple attached to the house, where 
the family performs its daily worship. There is a sense of per- 
sonal attachment between this image of the deity and the family, 
for the image generally comes down from past generations, often 
miraculously acquired by a pious ancestor at some remote time. 
. . . With the household gods is intimately associated the 
family priest. . . . The Hindu priest is a part of the family 
life of his flock, between whom and himself the tie has existed 
for many generations. The priest is not generally a man of 



250 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

much learning; be knows, however, the traditions of his faith. 
. . . He is not a very heavy burden, for be is satisfied with 
little — a few handfuls of rice, a few bome-gi'own bananas or 
vegetables, a little unrefined sugar made in the village, and 
sometimes a few pieces of copper are all that is needed. ... A 
picture of our family life would be incomplete without the 
household ser\'ants. A female servant is. known as the 'jhi,' or 
daughter, in Bengal — she is like the daughter of the house; 
she calls the master and the mistress father and mother, and 
the young men and women of the family brothers and sisters. 
She participates in the life of the family ; she goes to the holy 
places along with her mistress, for she could not go alone, and 
generally she spends her life with the family of her adoption ; 
her children are looked after by the family. The treatment of 
men servants is very similar. These servants, men and women, 
are generally people of the humbler castes", but a sense of per- 
sonal attachment grows up between them and the members of 
the family, and as they get on in years they are affectionately 
called by the younger meml)ers elder brothers, uncles, aunts, 
etc. ... In a well-to-do house there is always a resident 
teacher, who instructs the children of the family as well as 
other boys of the village; there is no expensive school building, 
but room is found in some veranda or shed in the courtyard for 
the children and their teacher, and into this school low-caste 
boys are freely admitted. These indigenous schools were not of 
a very high order, but they supplied an agency of instruction 
for the masses which was probably not available in many other 
countries. . . . 

"With Hindu life is bound up its traditional duty of hos- 
pitality. It is the duty of a householder to offer a meal to any 
stranger who may come before midday and a^ for one; the 
mistress of the house does not sit down to her meal until every 
member is fed, and, as sometimes her food is all that is left, 
she does not take her meal until well after midday lest a hungry 
stranger should come and claim one." . . . 

We have been tempted to quote Mr. Basu at some length, 
because here we do get to something like a living understanding 
of the type of household which has prevailed in human com- 
munities since J^eolithic days, which still prevails to-day in 



THE ARYAN-SPEAKING PEOPLES 251 

India, China, and the Far East, but which in the west is rapidly 
giving ground before a state and municipal organization of 
education and a large-scale industrialism within which an 
amount of individual detachment and freedom is possible, such 
as these great households never knew. . . . 

But let us return now to the history preserved for us in the 
Aryan epics. 

The Sanscrit epics tell a very similar story to that under- 
lying the Iliad, the story of a fair, beef-eating people — only 
later did they become vegetarians — coming down from Persia 
into the plain of North India and conquering their way slowly 
towards the Indus. From the Indus they spread over India, 
but as they spread they acquired much from the dark Dravidians 
they conquered, and they seem to have lost their bardic tradi- 
tion. The vedas, says Mr. Basu, were transmitted chiefly in 
the households by the wmnen. . . . 

The oral literature of the Keltic peoples who pressed west- 
ward has not been preserved so completely as that of the Greeks 
or Indians ; it was written down many centuries later, and so, 
like the barbaric, primitive English Beowulf, has lost any clear 
evidence of a period of migi^ation into the lands of an antece- 
dent people. If the pre-Aryans figure in it at all, it is as the 
fairy folk of the Irish stories. Ireland, most cut off of all 
the Keltic-speaking communities, retained to the latest date its 
primitive life; and the Tain, the Irish Iliad, describes a cattle- 
keeping life in which war chariots are still used, and war dogs 
also, and the heads of the slain are carried off slung round the 
horses' necks. The Tain is the story of a cattle raid. Here, 
too, the same social order appears as in the Iliad; the chiefs sit 
and feast in great halls, they build halls for themselves, there 
is singing and story-telling by the bards, and drinking and in- 
toxication. Priests are not very much in evidence, but there 
is a sort of medicine-man who deals in spells and prophecy. 



XXI 

THE GEEEKS AND THE PERSIANS 

1. The Hellenic Peoples. § 2. Distinctive Featui'es of Hel- 
lenic Civilization. § 3. Monarchy, Aristocracy, atid Democ- 
racy in Greece. § 4. The Kingdom of Lydia. § 5. The 
Rise of the Persians in the East. § 6. The Story of Croesus. 
§ 7. Darius Invades Russia. § 8. The Battle of Marathon. 
§ 9. Thermopylce and Salamis. § 10. Platcea and Mycale. 



THE Greeks appear in the dim light before the dawn of 
history (say, 1,500 b.c.) as one of the wandering im- 
perfectly nomadic Aryan peoples who were gradually 
extending the range of their pasturage southward into the Bal- 
kan peninsula and coming into conflict and mixing with that 
preceding ^Egean civilization of which Cnossos was the crown. 
In the Homeric poems these Greek tribes speak one common 
language, and a common tradition upheld by the epic poems 
keeps them together in a loose unity; they call their various 
tribes by a common name, Hellenes. They probably came in 
successive waves. Three main variations of the ancient Greek 
speech are distinguished: the Ionic, the ^olic, and the Doric. 
There was a gTcat variety of dialects. The lonians seem to 
have preceded the other Greeks, and to have mixed very inti- 
mately with the civilized peoples they overwhelmed. Racially 
the people of such cities as Athens and Miletus may have been 
less Nordic than Mediterranean. The Doric apparently con- 
stituted the last most powerful and least civilized wave of the 
migration. These Hellenic tribes conquered and largely de- 
stroyed the ^gean civilization that had preceded their arrival ; 
upon its ashes they built up a civilization of their own. They 
took to the sea and crossed by way of the islands to Asia Minor; 
and, sailing through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, spread 

252 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 



253 



their settlements along the south, and presently along the north 
borders of the Black Sea. They spread also over the south of 
Italy, which was called at last Magna Graicia, and round the 



^istribiiticm oF^ the 

'H&LLSNie -KAe&s 

1000 fc 800 B.e. 




northern coast of the Mediterranean. They founded the town 
of Marseilles on the site of an earlier Phoenician colony. They 
began settlements in Sicily in rivalry with the Carthaginians 
as early as 735 b.c. 

In the rear of the Greeks proper came the kindred Mace- 
donians and Thracians; on their left wing, the Phrygians 
crossed by the Bosphorus into Asia Minor. 

We find all this distribution of the Greeks effected before the 



254 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



beginnings of written history. 
By the seventh century b.c. 
— that is to say, by the time 
of the Babylonian captivity of 
the Jews — the landmarks of 
the ancient world of the pre- 
Hellenic civilization in Eu- 
rope have been obliterated. 
Tiryns and Cnossos are unim- 
portant sites; Mycenae and 
Troy survive in legend; the 
great cities of this new Greek 
world are Athens, Sparta (the 
capital of Lacedemon), 
Corinth, Thebes, Samos, 
Miletus, The world our 
grandfathers called "Ancient 
Greece" had arisen on the 
forgotten ruins of a still more 
Ancient Greece, in many 
ways as civilized and artistic, 
of which to-day we are only 
beginning to learn through 
the labours of the excavator. 
But the newer Ancient 
Greece, of which we are now 
telling, still lives vividly in 
the imaginations and institu- 
tions of men because it spoke 
a beautiful and most expres- 
sive Aryan tongue akin to our 
own, and because it had taken 
over the Mediterranean alpha- 
bet and perfected it by the ad- 
dition of vowels, so that read- 
ing and writing were now 
practise, and great numbers of 
people could master them and make a record for later ages.^ 

^ Vowels were less necessary for the expression of a Semitic language. 
In the early Semitic alphabets only A, I, and U were provided with sym- 
bols, but for such a language as Greek, in which many of the inflectional 
endings are vowels, a variety of vowel signs was indispensable. 




easy arts to learn 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 255 

§ 2 

Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South 
Italy and Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century b.c, 
is a civilization differing in mnny important respects from the 
two great civilized systems whose growths we have already 
traced, that of the Nile and that of the Two Eivers of Mesopo- 
tamia. These civilizations grew through long ages where they 
are found ; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a primi- 
tive agriculture; priest-kings and god-kings consolidated such 
early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herds- 
men raiders came southward into a world whose civilization 
was already an old story. Shipping and agriculture, walled 
cities and writing were already there. The Greeks did not 
grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one and put 
another together upon and out of the ruins. 

To this we must ascribe the fact that there is no temple- 
state stage, no stage of priest-kings, in the Greek record. The 
Greeks got at once to the city organization that in the east had 
grown round the temple. They took over the association of 
temple and city ; the idea was ready-made for them. What im- 
pressed them most about the city was probably its wall. It is 
doubtful if they took to city life and citizenship straight away. 
At first they lived in open villages outside the ruins of the cities 
they had destroyed, but there stood the model for them, a con- 
tinual suggestion. They thought first of a city as a safe place 
in a time of strife, and of the temple uncritically as a proper 
feature of the city. They came into this inheritance of a pre- 
vious civilization with the ideas and traditions of the wood- 
lands still strong in their minds. The heroic social system of 
the Iliad took possession of the land, and adapted itself to the 
new conditions. As history goes on the Greeks became more 
religious and superstitious as the faiths of the conquered welled 
up from below. 

We, have already said that the social structure of the primi- 
tive Aryans was a two-class system of nobles and commoners, 
the classes not very sharply marked off from each other, and 
led in warfare by a king who was simply the head of one of the 
noble families, pinmus inter pares, a leader among his equals. 
With the conquest of the aboriginal population and with the 
building of towns there was added to this simple social arrange- 



256 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ment of two classes a lower stratum of farm-workers and skilled 
and unskilled workers, who were for tlie most part slaves. But 
all the Greek conmiunities were not of this "conquest" type. 
Some were "refugee" cities representing smashed communities, 
and in these the aboriginal substratimi would be missing. 

In many of the former cases the sui-vivors of the earlier popu- 
lation formed a subject class, slaves of the state as a whole, as, 
for instance, the Helots in Sparta. The nobles and commoners 
became landlords and gentlemen farmers; it was they who 
directed the shipbuilding and engaged in trade. But some of 
the poorer free citizens followed mechanic arts, and, as we have 
already noted, would even pull an oar in a galley for pay. 
Such priests as there were in this Greek world were either the 
guardians of shrines and temples or sacrificial functionaries ; 
Aristotle, in his Politics, makes them a mere subdivision of 
his official class. The citizen served as warrior in youth, ruler 
in his maturity, priest in his old age. The priestly class, in 
comparison with the equivalent class in Egypt and Babylonia, 
was small and insignificant. The gods of the Greeks proper, 
the gods of the heroic Greeks, were, as we have already noted, 
glorified human beings, and they were treated without very 
much fear or awe; but beneath these gods of the conquering 
freemen lurked other gods of the subjugated peoples, who found 
their furtive followers among slaves and women. The original 
Aryan gods were not expected to work miracles or control men's 
lives. But Greece, like most of the Eastern world in the thou- 
sand years b.c, was much addicted to consulting oracles or 
soothsayers. Delphi was particularly famous for its oracle. 
"When the Oldest Men in the tribe could not tell you the right 
thing to do," says Gilbert Murray, "you went to the blessed 
dead. All oracles were at the tombs of Heroes. They told you 
what was 'Themis,' what was the right thing to do, or, as re 
ligious people would put it now, what was the Will of the God.'' 

The priests and priestesses of these temples were not united 
into one class, nor did they exercise any power as a class. It 
was the nobles and free commoners, two classes which, in some 
cases, merged into one common body of citizens, who consti- 
tuted the Greek state. In many cases, especially in great city 
states, the population of slaves and unenfranchised strangers 
greatly outnumbered the citizens. But for them the state 
existed only by courtesy; it existed legally for the select body 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 



257 



of citizens alone. It might or might not tolerate the outsider 
and the slave, but they had no legal voice in their treatment 
— any more than if it had been a despotism. 

This is a social structure differing widely from that of the 
Eastern monarchies. The exclusive im|>ortance of the Greek 
citizen reminds one a little of the exclusive importance of the 
children of Israel in the later Jewish state, but there is no 
equivalent on the Greek side to the prophets' and priests, nor 
to the idea of an overruling Jehovah. 

Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the 
human communities to which we have hitherto given attention 








'Powers in. an. 7^:dicrdan. ivarsbip, ahoui 4C0 'B.C. (fFraamxettt 

of relief fouxid. on. Ac 'Iharopolis) 



is their continuous and incurable division. The civilizations 
of Egypt, Sumeria, China, and no doubt North India, all began 
in a number of independent city states, each one a city with a 
few miles of dependent agricultural villages and cultivation 
around it, but out of this phase they passed by a process of 
coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end 
of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. Com- 
monly, this is ascribed to the geographical conditions under 
which they lived. Greece is a country cut up iato a multitude 
of valleys by mountain masses and arms of the sea that render 
intercommunication difficult ; so difficult that few cities were 
able to hold many of the others in subjection for any length 
of time. Moreover, many Greek cities were on islands and 
scattered along remote coasts. To the end the largest city states 
of Greece remained smaller than many English counties; and 



258 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

some had an area of only a few square miles. Athens, one of 
the largest of the Greek cities, at the climax of its power had 
a population of perhaps a third of a million. I ew other Greek 
cities exceeded 50,000. Of this, half or more were slaves and 
strangers, and two-thirds of the free body women and children". 

§ 3 

The government of these city states varied very widely in its 
nature. As they settled down after their conquests the Greeks 
retained for a time the rule of their kings, but these kingdoms 
drifted back more and more to the rule of the aristocratic class. 
In Sparta (Lacedemon) kings were still distinguished in the 
sixth century b.c. The Lacedemonians had a curious system 
of a double kingship; two kings, drawn from different royal 
families, ruled together. But most of the Greek city states 
had become aristocratic republics long before the sixth century. 
There is, however, a tendency towards slackness and inefficiency 
in most families that rule by hereditary right ; sooner or later 
they decline; and as the Greeks got out upon the seas and set 
up colonies and commerce extended, new rich families arose to 
jostle the old and bring new personalities into power. These 
nouveaux riches became members of an expanded ruling class, 
a mode of government known as oligarchy — in opposition to 
aristocracy — though, strictly, the term oligarchy ( = govern- 
ment by the few) should of course include hereditary aristocracy 
as a special case. 

In many cities persons of exceptional energy, taking advan- 
tage of some social conflict or class grievance, secured a more 
or less irregular power in the state. This combination of 
personality and opportunity has occurred in the United States 
of America, for example, where men exercising various kinds 
of infonmal power are called bosses. In Greece they were 
called tyrants. But the tyrant was rather more than a boss ; 
he was recognized as a monarch, and claimed the authority 
of a monarch. The modern boss, on the other hand, shelters 
behind legal forms which he has "got hold of" and uses for 
his own ends. Tyrants were distinguished from kings, who 
claimed some sort of right, some family priority, for example, 
to rule. They were supported, perhaps, by the poorer class 
with a grievance; Peisistratus, for example, who was tyrant of 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 259 

Athens, with two intervals of exile, between 560 and 527 b.c, 
was supported by the poverty-struck Athenian hillmen. Some- 
times, as in Greek Sicily, the tyrant stood for the rich against 
the poor. When, later on, the Persians began to subjugate the 
Greek cities of Asia Minor, they set up pro-Persian tyrants. 

Aristotle, the great philosophical teacher, who was born under 
the hereditary Macedonian monarchy, and who was for some 
years tutor to the king's son, distinguishes in his Politics be- 
tween kings who ruled by an admitted and inherent right, such 
as the King of Macedonia, whom he served, and tyrants who 
ruled without the consent of the governed. As a matter of 
fact, it is hard to conceive of a tyrant ruling without the con- 
sent of many, and the active participation of a substantial num- 
ber of his subjects ; and the devotion and unselfishness of your 
''true kings" has been known to rouse resentment and question- 
ing. . Aristotle was also able to say that while the king ruled 
for the good of the state, the tyrant ruled for his own. good. 
Upon this point, as in his ability to regard slavery as a natural 
thing and to consider women unfit for freedom and political 
rights, Aristotle was in harmony with the trend of events about 
him. 

A third form of government that prevailed increasingly in 
Greece in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., was known 
as democracy. As the modern world nowadays is constantly 
talking of democracy, and as the modern idea of democracy is 
something widely dift'erent from the democracy of the Greek 
city states, it will be well to be very explicit upon the meaning 
of democracy in Greece. Democracy then was government by 
the commonalty, the Demos ; it was government by the whole 
body of the citizens, by the many as distinguished from the few. 
But let the modern reader mark that word ''citizen." The slave 
was excluded, the freedman was excluded, the stranger; even 
the Greek born in the city, whose father had come eight or ten 
miles from the city beyond the headland, was excluded. The 
earlier democracies (but not all) demanded a property qualifica- 
tion from the citizen, and property in those days was land ; this 
was subsequently relaxed, but the modem reader will grasp 
that here was something very different from modern democracy. 
At the end of the fifth century b.c. this property qualification 
had been abolislied in Athens, for example; but Pericles, a 
great Athenian statesman of whom we shall have more to tell 



260 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

later, had established a law (451 b.c.) restricting citizenship to 
those who could establish Athenian descent on both sides. Thus, 
in the Greek democracies quite as much as in the oligarchies, 
the citizens fonned a close corporation, ruling sometimes, as in 
the case of Athens in its great days, a big population of serfs, 
slaves, and "outlanders." A modern politician used to the idea, 
the entirely new and different idea, that democracy in its per- 
fected form means that eveiy adult man and woman shall have 
a voice in the government, would, if suddenly spirited back to 
the extremist Greek democracy, regard it as a kind of oligarchy. 
The only real difference between a Greek ' 'oligarchy" and a 
Greek democracy was that in the former the poorer and less 
important citizens had no voice in the government, and in the 
latter every citizen had. Aristotle, in his Politics, betrays very 
clearly the practical outcome of this difference. Taxation set 
lightly on the rich in the oligarchies; the democracies, on the 
other hand, taxed the rich, and generally paid the impecunious 
citizen a maintenance allowance and special fees. In Athens 
fees were paid to citizens even for attending the general as- 
sembly. But the generality of people outside the happy order 
of citizens worked and did what they were told, and if one 
desired the protection of the law, one sought a citizen to plead 
for one. For only the citizen had any standing in the law 
courts. The modern idea, that any one in the state should be 
a citizen, would have shocked the privileged democrats of 
Athens profoundly. 

One obvious result of this monopolization of the state by the 
class of citizens was that the patriotism of these privileged 
people took an intense and narrow form. They would form 
alliances, but never coalesce with other city states. That would 
have obliterated every advantage by which they lived. The 
narrow geographical limits of these Greek states added to the 
intensity of their feeling. A man's love for his country was 
reinforced by his love for his native town, his religion, and his 
home; for these were all one. Of course the slaves did not 
share in these feelings, and in the oligarchic states very often 
the excluded class got over its dislike of foreigners in its greater 
dislike of the class at home which oppressed it. But in the 
main, patriotism in the Greek was a personal passion of an 
inspiring and dangerous intensity. Like rejected love, it was 
apt to turn into something very like hatred. The Greek exile 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 261 

resembled the French or Russian emigre in being ready to treat 
his beloved country pretty roughly in order to save her from 
the devils in human form who had taken possession of her and 
turned Jiim out. 

In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relation- 
ships with a number of other Greek city states which is often 
spoken of by historians as the Athenian Empire. But all the 
other city states retained their own governments. One ''new 
fact" added by the Athenian Empire was the complete and 
effective suppression of piracy; another was the institution of 
a sort of international law. The law indeed was Athenian law; 
but actions could now be brought and justice administered be- 
tween citizens of the different states of the League, which of 
course had not been possible before. The Athenian Empire had 
really developed out of a league of mutual defence against 
Persia ; its seat had originally been in the island of Delos, and 
the allies had contributed to a coimnon treasure at Delos ; the 
treasure of Delos was carried off to Athens because it was ex- 
posed to a possible Persian raid. Then one city af<^er another 
offered a monetary contribution instead of military service, with 
the result that in the end Athens was doing almost all the work 
and receiving almost all the money. She was supported by 
one or two of the larger islands. The "League" in this way 
became gradually an "Empire," but the citizens of the allied 
states remained, except where there were special treaties of 
intermarriage and the like, practically foreigners to one an- 
other. And it was chiefly the poorer citizens of Athens who 
sustained this empire by their most vigorous and incessant per- 
sonal service. Every citizen was liable to military service at 
home or abroad between the ages of eighteen and sixty, some- 
times on purely Athenian affairs and sometimes in defence of 
the cities of the Empire whose citizens had bought themselves 
off. There w^as probably no single man over twenty-five in the 
Athenian Assembly who had not served in several campaigns 
in different parts of the Mediterranean or Black Sea, and who 
did not expect to serve again. Modern imperialism is denounced 
by its opponents as the exploitation of the world by the rich ; 
Athenian imperialism was the exploitation of the world by the 
poorer citizens of Athens. 

Another difference from modem conditions, due to the siuall 
size of the Greek city states, was that in a democracy every 



262 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

citizen had the right to attend and speak and vote in the popular 
assembly. For most cities this meant a gathering of only a 
few hundred people ; the greatest had no more than some thou- 
sands of citizens. ISTothing of this sort is possible in a modern 
"democracy" with, perhaps, several million voters. The mod- 
ern "citizen's" voice in public affairs is limited to the right 
to vote for one or other of the party candidates put before 
him. He, or she, is then supposed to have "assented" to the 
resultant government. Aristotle, who would have enjoyed the 
electoral methods of our modern democracies keenly, points out 
very subtly how the outlying farmer class of citizens in a 
democracy can be virtually disenfranchised by calling the popu- 
lar assembly too frequently for their regular attendance. In 
the later Greek democracies (fifth century) the appointment 
of public officials, except in the case of officers requiring very 
special knowledge, was by casting lots. This was supposed to 
protect the general corporation of privileged citizens from, the 
continued predominance of rich, influential, and conspicuously 
able men. 

Some democracies (Athens and Miletus, e.g.) had an insti- 
tution called the ostracism,^ by which in times of crisis and 
conflict the decision was made whether some citizen should go 
into exile for ten years. This may strike a modern reader as 
an envious institution, but that was not its essential quality. 
It was, says Gilbert JNfurray, a way of arriving at a decision 
in a case when political feeling was so divided as to threaten a 
deadlock. There were in the Greek democracies parties and 
party leaders, but no regular government in office and no regu- 
lar opposition. There was no way, therefore, of carrying out 
a policy, although it might be the popular policy, if a strong 
leader or a strong group stood out against it. But by the 
ostracism, the least popular or the least trusted of the chief 
leaders in the divided community was made to retire for a 
period without loss of honour or property. Professor Murray 
suggests that a Greek democracy, if it had found itself in such 
a position of deadlock as the British Empire did upon the 
question of Home Rule for Ireland in 1914, would have prob- 
ably first ostracized Sir Edward Carson, and then proceeded 
to carry out the provisions of the Home Rule Bill, 

This institution of the ostracism has immortalized one ob- 

' From ostrakon, a tile; the voter wrote the name on a tile or shell. 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 263 

sciire and rather illiterate member of the democracy of Athens. 
A certain Aristides had gained a ^'eat reputation in the law 
court for his righteous dealing. He fell into a dispute with 
Themistocles upon a question of naval policy ; Aristides was for 
the army, Themistocles was a "strong navy" man, and a dead- 
lock was threatened. There was resort to an ostracism to 
decide between them. Plutarch relates that as Aristides walked 
through the streets while the voting was in progress, he was 
accosted by a strange citizen from the agricultural environs 
unaccustomed to the art of writ :r.g, and requested to write his 
own name on the proffered potsherd. 

"But why ?" he asked. "Has Aristides ever injured you ?" 

"No," said the citizen, "l^o. Never have I set eyes on 
him. But, oh ! I am so hored by hearing him called Aristides 
the Just." 

Whereupon, says Plutarch, without further parley Aristides 
wrote as the man desired. . . . 

When one understands the true meaning of these Greek con- 
stitutions, and in particular the limitation of all power, whether 
in the democracies or the oligarchies, to a locally privileged 
class, one realizes how impossible was any eifective union of 
the hundreds of Greek cities scattered about the Mediterranean 
region, or even of any effective co-operation between them for 
a common end. Each city was in the hands of a few or a few 
hundred men, to whom its separateness meant everything that 
was worth having in life. Only conquest from the outside could 
unite the Greeks, and until Greece was conquered they had no 
political unity. When at last they were conquered, they were 
conquered so completely that their unity ceased to be of any 
importance even to themselves ; it was a unity of subjugation. 

Yet there was always a certain tradition of unity between 
all the Greeks, based on a common language and script, on 
the common possession of the heroic epics, and on the con- 
tinuous intercourse that the maritime position of the states 
made possible. And in addition, there were certain religious 
bonds of a unifying kind. Certain shrines, the shrines of the 
god Apollo in the island of Delos and at Delphi, for example, 
were sustained not by single states, but by leagues of states or 
Amphictyonies (= League of neighbours), which in such in- 
stances as the Delphic amphictyony became very wide-reaching 
unions. The league protected the shrine and the safety of 



264 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

pilgrims, kept up the roads leading thereunto, secured peace at 
the time of special festivals, upheld certain rules to mitigate 
the usages of war among its memhers, and — the Delian league 
especially — suppressed piracy. A still more impoi-tant link of 
Hellenic imion was the Olympian games that were held every 
four years at Olympia. Foot races, boxing, wrestling, javelin 
throwing, quoit throwing, jumping, and chariot and horse racing 
were the chief sports, and a record of victors and distinguished 
visitors was kept. From the year T76 B.C. onward ^ these games 
were held regularly for over a thousand years, and they did 
much to maintain that sense of a common Greek life (pan- 
Hellenic) transcending the narrow politics of the city states. 

Such links of sentiment and association were of little avail 
against the intense ''separatism" of the Greek political institu- 
tions. From the History of Herodotus the student will he able 
to gather a sense of the intensity and persistence of the feuds 
that kept the Greek world in a state of chronic warfare. In the 
old days (say, to the sixth century B.C.) fairly large families 
prevailed in Greece, and something of the old Aryan great 
household system (see Chap. XX), with its strong clan feeling 
and its capacity for maintaining an enduring feud, still re- 
mained. The history of Athens circles for many years about 
the feud of two great families, the Alcmseonida^ and the Peisis- 
tratida? ; the latter equally an aristocratic family, but founding 
its power on the support of the poorer class of the populace 
and the exploitation of their gTievances. Later on, in the sixth 
and fifth centuries, a limitation of births and a shrinkage of 
families to two or three members — a process Aristotle notes 
without perceiving its cause — led to the disappearance of the 
old aristocratic clans, and the later w^ars were due rather to 
trade disputes and grievances caused and stirred up by indi- 
vidual adventurers than to family vendettas. 

It is easy to understand, in view of this intense separatism 
of the Greeks, how readily the lonians of Asia and of the 
islands fell first under the domination of the kingdom of Lydia, 
and then under that of the Persians when Cyrus overthrew 
Croesus, the king of Lydia. They rebelled only to be recon- 
quered. Then came the turn of European Greece. It is a 
matter of astonishment, the Greeks themselves were astonished, 

'■ 776 B.C. is the year of the First Olympiad, a valuable starting-point in 
Greek chronology. 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 265 

to find that Greece itself did not fall under the dominion of 
the Persians, these barbaric Aryan masters of the ancient civili- 
zations of Western Asia. But before we tell of this struggle 
we must give some attention tO' these Asiatics against whom they 
were pitted ; and particularly to these Medes and Persians who, 
by ^-jS B.C., were already in possession of the ancient civiliza- 
tions of Assyria, Babylonia and about to subjugate Egypt. 



We have had occasion to mention the kingdom of Lydia, and 
it may be well to give a short note here upon the Lydians before 
proceeding with our story. The original population of the 
larger part of Asia Minor may perhaps have been akin to the 
original population of Greece and Crete. If so, it was of 
"Mediterranean" race. Or it may have been another branch of 
those still more generalized and fundamental darkish peoples 
from whom arose the Mediterranean race to the west and the 
Dravidians to the east. Remains of the same sort of art that 
distinguishes Cnossos and Mycenee are to be found scattered 
over Asia Minor. But just as the ISTordic Greeks poured south- 
ward into Greece to conquer and mix with the aborigines, so 
did other and kindred Nordic tribes pour over the Bosphorus 
into Asia Minor. Over some areas these Aryan peoples pre- 
vailed altogether, and became the bulk of the inhabitants and 
retained their Aryan speech. Such were the Phrygians, a peo- 
ple whose language was almost as close to that of the Greeks as 
the Macedonian, But over other areas the Aryans did not so 
prevail. In Lydia the original race and their language held 
their own. The Lydians were a non-Aryan people speaking a 
non-Aryan speech, of which at the present time only a few 
words are known. Their capital city was Sardis. 

Their religion was also non-Aryan. They worshipped a 
Great Mother goddess. The Phrygians also, though retaining 
their Greek-like language, became infected with mysterious 
religion, and much of the mystical religion and secret cere- 
monial that pervaded Athens at a later date was Phrygian 
(when not Thracian) in origin. 

At first the Lydians held the western sea-coast of Asia Minor, 
but they Were driven back from it by the establishment of 
Ionian Greeks coming by the sea and founding cities. Later 



266 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

on, however, these Ionian Greek cities were brought into sub- 
jection by the Lydian kings. 

The history of this country is not clearly known, and were 
it known it would scarcely be of sufficient importance to be 
related in this historical outline, but in the eighth century b.c, 
one monarch, named Gyges, becomes noteworthy. The country 
under his rule was subjected to another Aryan invasion; certain 
nomadic tribes called the Cimmerians came pouring across Asia 
Minor, and they were driven back with difficulty by Gyges and 
his son and grandson. Sardis was twice taken and burnt by 
these barbarians. And it is on record that Gyges paid tribute 
to Sardanapalus, which sei-ves to link him up with our general 
ideas of the history of Assyria, Israel, and Egypt. Later Gyges 
rebelled against Assyria, and sent troops to help Psammetichus I 
to liberate Eg\"pt from its brief servitude to the Assyrians. 

It was Alyattes, the gTandson of Gyges, who»made Lydia into 
a considerable power. He reigued for seven years, and lie re- 
duced most of the- Ionian cities of Asia Minor to subjection. 
The country became the centre of a gTeat trade between Asia 
and Europe; it had always been productive and rich in gold, 
and now the Lydian monarch was reputed the richest in Asia. 
There was a great coming and going between the Black and 
Mediterranean Seas, and between the East and West. We have 
already noted that Lydia was reputed to be the first country in 
the world to produce coined money, and to provide the conven- 
ience of inns for travellers and traders. The Lydian dynasty 
seems to have been a trading dynasty of the type of Minos in 
Crete, with a banking and financial development. ... So much 
we may note of Lydia by way of preface to the next section. 



Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had de- 
veloped along the lines we have described in^ Greece, Magna 
Grsecia, and around the shores of the Black Sea, another series 
of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose originally Nordic blood was 
perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian element, were settling 
and spreading to the north and east of the Assyrian and Baby- 
lonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like dis- 
persion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black 
and Caspian Seas ; it was probably by this route that the Aryan- 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 267 

speaking races gradually came down into what is now the 
Persian country, and spread, on the one hand, eastward to India 
( ? 2,000 to 1,000 B.C.), and on the other, increased and multi- 
plied in the Persian uplands until they were strong enough to 
assail first Assyria (650 b.c.) and then Babylon (538 b.c). 

There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of 
climate that have been going on in Europe and Asia during the 
last 10,000 years. The ice of the last glacial age receded grad- 
ually, and gave way to a long period of steppe or prairie-like 
conditions over the great plain of Europe. About 12,000 or 
10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this state of affairs 
was giving place to forest conditions. We have already noted 
how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse 
hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer 
hunters ; and these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agri- 
culturists. For some thousands of years the European climate 
seems to have been warmer than it is to-day. A great sea spread 
from the coast of the Balkan peninsula far into Central Asia 
and extended northward into Central Eussia, and the shrinkage 
of that sea and the consequent hardening of the climate of South 
Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with 
the development of the first civilizations in the river valleys. 
Many facts seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe 
and Western Asia, and still more strongly to a greater luxuri- 
ance of plant and vegetable life, 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, than 
we find to-day. There were forests then in South Russia and 
in the country which is now Western Turkestan, where now 
steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1,500 
and 2,000 years ago, the Aral-Caspian region was probably 
drier and those seas smaller than they are at the present time. 

We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the 
fifteenth century B.C.), in his expedition beyond the Euphrates, 
hunted a herd of 120 elephants in that region. Again, an 
^gean dagger from Mycenae, dating about 2,000 B.C., shows a 
lion-hunt in progress. The hunters carry big shields and spears, 
and stand in rows one behind the other. The first man spears 
the lion, and when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat 
under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to 
repeat his stroke, and so o«n, until the lion is speared to death. 
This method of hunting is practised by the Masai to-day, and 
could only have been worked out by a people in a land where 



268 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

lions were abundant. But abundant lions imply abundant ^ame, 
and that again means abundant vegetation. About 2,000 b.c. 
the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the Old 
World, to which we have already referred, which put an end 
to elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece/ was turning 
the faces of the nomadic Aryan peoples southward towards the 
fields and forests of the more settled and civilized nations. 

These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian 
regions into history about the time that Mycenie and Troy and 
Cnossos are falling to the Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle 
the different tribes and races that appear under a multitude of 
names in the records and inscriptions that record their first ap- 
pearance, but, fortunately, these distinctions are not needed in 
an elementary outline such as this present history. A people 
called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya 
and Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia 
to Elam, In the ninth century b.c, a people called the Medes, 
very closely related to the Persians to the east of them, appear 
in the Assyrian inscriptions. Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon 
II, names already familiar in this story, profess to have made 
them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the inscriptions as the 
"dangerous Medes." They are as yet a tribal people, not united 
under one king. 

About the ninth century b.c. Elam and the Elamites, whose 
capital was Susa, a people which possessed a tradition and 
civilization at least as old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish 
from history. We do not know what happened. They seem 
to have been ovennin and the population absorbed by the con- 
querors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians. 

A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear 
at this time in the narrative of Herodotus, are the "Scythians." 
For a while the monarchs of Assyria play off these various 
kindred peoples, the Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and 

* It is, at least, doubtful whether any change of climate expelled either 
lion or elephant from southeast Europe and Asia Minor; the cause of 
their gradual disappearance was — I think — nothing but Man, increasingly 
well arnifd for tlie chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan peninsula till 
about the fourth century B.C., if not later. Elephants had perhaps dis- 
appeared from western Asia by the eighth century B.C. The lion (much 
bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany till the 
Neolithic period. The panther inhabited Greece, southern Italy, and 
southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period (say 
1,000 B.C.).— H. H. J. 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 



the Scythians, against each other. Assyrian princesses (a 
daughter of Esarhaddon, e.g.) are married to Scythian chiefs. 
Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the 
other hand, marries a daugh- 
ter of Cyaxares, yrho has become 
king of all the Medes. The Aryan 
Scythians are for the Semitic 
Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for 
the Semitic Babylonians, It y^as 
this Cyaxares who took Nine- 
yeh, the Assyrian capital, in 606 
B.C., and so released Babylon from 
the Assyrian yoke to establish, 
under Chaldean rule, the Second 
Babylonian Empire. The Scyth- 
ian allies of Assyria drop out of 
the story after this. They go on 
liying their own life away to the 
north without much interference 
with the peoples to the south. A 
glance at the map of this 
period shows how, for two-thirds 
of a century, the Second Baby- 
lonian Empire lay like a lamb 
within the embrace of the Median 
lion. 

Into the internal struggles of 
the Medes and Persians, that 
ended at last in the accession of 
Cyrus "the Persian" to the 
throne of Cyaxares in 550 e.g., 
wfe will not enter. In that year 
Cyrus was ruling oyer an empire 
that reached from the boundaries 
of Lydia to Persia and perhaps 
to India. Nabonidus, the last of 
the Babylonian rulers, was, as we haye already told, digging up 
old records and buildir-g temples in Babylonia. 










270 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



But one monarcli in tlie world was alive to tlie threat of the 
new power that lay in the hands of Cyrus. This was Croesus, 
the Lydian king. His son had been killed in a very tragic man- 
ner, which Herodotus relates, but which we will not describe! 
here. Says Herodotus : 

"For two years then, Croesus remained quiet in great mourn- 
ing, because he was deprived of his son; but after this period 
of time, the overthrowing of the rule of the son of Cyaxares 




by Cyrus, and the growing greatness of the Persians, caused 
Croesus to cease from his mourning, and led him to .a care of 
cutting short the power of the Persians if by any means he 
might, while yet it was in growth and before they should have 
become great." 

He then made trial of the various oracles. 

"To the Lydians who were to carry these gifts to the temples 
Croesus gave charge that they should ask the Oracles this ques- 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 271 

tion: whether Croesus should march against the Persians, and, 
if so, whether he should join v/ith himself any army of men 
as his friends. And when the Lydians had arrived at the places 
to which they had been sent and had dedicated the votive offer- 
ings, they inquired of the Oracles, and said : 'Croesus, king of 
the Lydians and of other nations, considering that these are 
the only true Oracles among men, presents to you gifts such 
as your revelations desen^e, and asks you again now whether 
he shall march against the Persians, and, if so, whether he shall 
join with himself any army of men as allies.' They inquired 
thus, and the answers of both the Oracles agreed in one, de- 
claring to Croesus that if he should march against the Persians 
he should destroy a great empire. ... So when the answers 
were brought back and Croesus heard them, he was delighted 
with the Oracles, and expecting that he would certainly destroy 
the kingdom of Cynis, he sent again to Pytho, and presented 
to the men of Delphi, having ascertained the number of them, 
two staters of gold for each man: and in return for this the 
Delphians gave to Croesus and to the Lydians precedence in 
consulting the Oracle and freedom from all payments, and the 
right to front seats at the games, with this privilege also for 
all time, that any one of them who wished should be allowed 
to become a citizen of Delphi." 

So Croesus made a defensive alliance both with the Lace- 
demonians and the Egyptians. And Herodotus continues, 
"while Croesus was preparing to march against the Persians, 
one of the Lydians, who even before this time was thought to 
be a wise man, but in consequence of this opinion got a very 
great name for wisdom among the Lydians, advised Croesus 
as follows: 'O king, thou art preparing to march against men 
who wear breeches of leather, and the rest of their clothing is of 
leather also ; and they eat food not such as they desire, but such 
as they can obtain, dwelling in a land which is rugged; and, 
moreover, they make no use of wine but drink water; and no 
figs have they for dessert, nor any other good thing. On the 
one hand, if thou shalt overcome them, what wilt thou take 
away from them, seeing they have nothing? and, on the other 
hand, if thou shalt be overcome, consider how many good things 
thou wilt lose ; for once having tasted our good things, they will 
cling to them fast, and it will not be possible to drive them away. 
I, for my own part, feel gratitude to the gods that they do not 



272 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

put it into the minds of the Persians to inarch against the 
Lydians.' Thus he spoke not persuading- Croesus ; for it is true 
indeed that the Persians hcfore they subdued the Lydians had 
no hixury nor any good thing." 

Croesus and Cyrus fought an indecisive battle at Pteria, from 
which Croesus retreated. Cyrus followed him up, and he gave 
battle outside his capital town of Sardis. The chief strength 
of the Lydians lay in their cavalry ; they were excellent, if 
undisciplined, horsemen, and fought with long spears. 

"Cyrus, when he saw the Lydians being arrayed for battle, 
fearing their horsemen, did on the suggestion of Harpagos, a 
Mede, as follows: All the camels which were in the train of 
his army carrying provisions and baggage he gathered together 
and he took off their burdens and set men upon them provided 
with the equipment of cavalry; and, having thus furnished 
them, forth he appointed them to go in front of the rest of 
the a.rmy towards the horsemen of Croesus ; and after the camel- 
troop he ordered the infantry to follow ; and behind the infantry 
he placed his whole force of cavalry. Then, when all his men 
had been placed in their several positions, he charged them 
to spare none of the other Lydians, slaying all who might come 
in their way, but Croesus himself they were not to slay, not even 
if he should make resistance when he was being captured. Such 
was his charge : and he set the camels opposite the horsemen for 
this reason — because the horse has a fear of the camel and 
cannot endure either to see his fonn or to scent his smell : for 
this reason then the trick had been devised, in order that the 
cavalry of Croesus might be useless, that very force wherewith 
the Lydian king was expecting most to shine. And as they 
were coming together to the battle, so soon as the horses scented 
the camels and saw them, they turned away back, and the hopes 
of Cioesus were at once brought to nought." 

In fourteen days Sardis was stormed and Croesus taken 
prisoner. . . . 

"So the Persians having taken him brought him into the 
presence of Cyrus ; and he piled up a great pyre and caused 
Croesus to go up upon it bound in fetters, and along with him 
twice seven sons of Lydians, whether it was that he meant to 
dedicate this otfering as first-fruits of his victory to some god, 
or whether he desired to fulfil a vow, or else had heard that 
Croesus was a god-fearing man, and so caused him to go up on 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 57^ 

the pyre because he wished to know if any one of the divine 
powers would save him, so that he should not be burnt alive. 
He, they say, did this ; but to Croesus as he stood upon the pyre 
there came, although he was in such evil case, a memory of 
the saying of Solon, how he had said with divine inspiration 
that no one of the living might be called happy. And when 
this thought came into his mind, they say that he sighed deeply 
and groaned aloud, having been for long silent, and three times 
he uttered the name of Solon. Hearing this, Cyrus bade the 
interpreters ask Croesus who was this person on whom he called ; 
and they came near and asked. And Croesus for a time, it is 
said, kept silence when he was asked this, but aftei*wards, being 
pressed, he said : 'One whom more than much wealth I should 
have desired to have speech with all monarchs.' Then, since his 
words were of doubtful import, they asked again of that which 
he said ; and as they were urgent with him and gave him no 
peace, he told how once Solon, an Athenian, had come and 
having inspected all his wealth had made light of it, with such 
and such words ; and how all had turned out for him according 
as Solon had said, not speakiiig at all especially with a view to 
Croesus himself, but with a view to the whole human race, and 
especially those who seem to themselves to be happy men. And 
while Croesus related those things, already the pyre was lighted 
and the edges of it round about were burning. Then they say 
that Cyrus, hearing from the interpreters what Croesus had 
said, changed his purpose and considered that he himself also 
was but a man, and that he was delivering another man, who 
had been not inferior to himself in felicity, alive to the lire; 
and, moreover, he feared the requital, and reflected that there 
was nothing of that which men possessed which was secure; 
therefore, they say, he ordered them to extinguish as quickly 
as possible the fire that was burning, and to bring down Croesus 
and those who were with him from the pyre; and they, using 
endeavours, were not able now to get the mastery of the flames. 
Then it is related by the Lydians that Croesus, having learned 
how Cyras had changed his mind, and seeing that every one was 
trying to put out the fire, but that they were no longer able 
to check it, cried aloud, entreating Apollo that if any gift had 
ever been given by him which was acceptable to the god, he 
would come to his aid and rescue him from the evil which was 
now upon him. So he with tears entreated the p'od, and sud- 



274 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

denly, thej say, after clear sky and calm weather clouds slathered 
and a storm burst, and it rained with a xerj violent shower, 
and the pyre was extinj^uished. 

"Then Cyrus, having perceived that Croesus was a lover of 
the gods and a good man, caused him to be brought down from 
the pyre and asked him as follows: 'Croesus, tell me who of 
all men was it who persuaded thee to march upon my land and 
so to become an enemy to me instead of a friend ?' And he said : 
*0 king, I did this to thy felicity and to my own misfortune, 
and the causer of this was the god of the Hellenes, who incited 
me to march with my army. For no one is so senseless as to 
choose of his own will war rather than peace, since in peace 
the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their 
sons. But it was pleasing, I suppose, to the divine powers that 
these things should come to pass thus.' " 

So Croesus became a councillor of Cyrus, and lived in Baby- 
lon. When Lydia was subdued, Cyrus turned his attention to 
l^abonidus in Babylon. He defeated the Babylonian army, 
under Belshazzar, outside Babylon, and then laid siege to the 
town. He entered the town (538 B.C.), probably as we have 
already suggested, with the connivance of the priests of Bel. 



Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who took an army 
into Egypt (525 B.C.). There was a battle in the delta, in 
which Greek mercenaries fought on both sides. Herodotus 
declares that he saw the bones of the slain still lying on the 
field fifty or sixty years later, and comments on the comparative 
thinness of the Persian skulls. After this battle Cambyses took 
Memphis and most of Egypt. 

In Egypt, we are told, Cambyses went mad. He took great 
liberties with the Egyptian temj^les, and remained at Memphis 
"opening ancient tombs and examining the dead bodies." He 
had already murdered both Croesus, ex-king of Lydia, and his 
own brother Smerdis before coming to Egypt, and he died in 
Syria on the way back to Susa of an accidental wound, leaving 
no heirs to succeed him. He was presently succeeded by Darius 
the Mede (521 b.c), the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief 
councillors of Cyrus. 

The empire of Darius I was larger than any one of the pre- 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 275 

ceding empires whose growth we have traced. It included all 
Asia Minor and Syria, that is to say, the ancient Lydian and 
Hittite empires, all the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires, 
Eg}'pt, the Caucasus and Caspian regions, Media, Persia, and 
it extended, perhaps, into India to the Indus. The nomadic 
Arabians alone of all the peoples of what is nowadays called the 
Near East, did not pay tribute to the satraps (proA'incial gover- 
nors) of Darius. The organization of this great empire seems 
to have been on a much higher level of efficiency than any of 
its precursors. Great arterial' roads joined province to prov- 
ince, and there was a system of royal posts ; ^ at stated intervals 
post horses stood always ready to carry the government messen- 
ger, or the traveller if he had a government permit, on to the 
next stage of his journey. Apart from this imperial right-of- 
way and the payment of tribute, the local governments possessed 
a very considerable amount of local freedom. They were re- 
strained from internecine conflict, which was all to their own 
good. And at first the Greek cities of the mainland of Asia 
paid the tribute and shared in this Persian Peace. 

Darius was first incited to attack the Greeks in Europe by a 
homesick Greek physician at his court, who wanted at any 
cost to be back in Greece. Darius had already made plans for 
an expedition into Europe, aiming not at Greece, but to the 
northward of Greece, across the Bosphorus and Danube. He 
wanted to strike at South Russia, which he believed to be the 
home country of the Scythian nomads who threatened him on 
his northern and north-eastern frontiers. But he lent an at- 
tentive ear to the tempter, and sent agents into Greece. 

This great expedition of Darius opens out our view in this 
history. It lifts a curtain upon the Balkan country behind 
Greece about which we have said nothing hitherto; it carries 
us to and over the Danube. The nucleus of his army marched 
from Susa, gathering up contingents as they made their way 
to the Bosphonis. Here Greek allies (Ionian Greeks from 
Asia) had made a bridge of boats, and the army crossed over 
while the Greek allies sailed on in their ships to the Danube, 
and, two days' sail up from its mouth, landed to make another 
floating bridge. Meanwhile, Darius and his host advanced along 
the coast of what is now Bulga'ria, but which was then called 

' But a thousand years earlier the Hittites seem to have had paved high- 
roads running across their country. 



276 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 277 

Thrace. They crossed the Danube, and prepared to ^ve battle 
to the Scythian army and take the cities of the Scythians. 

But the Scythians had no cities, and they evaded a battle, 
and the war degenerated into a tedious and hopeless pursuit of 
more mobile enemies. Wells were stopped up and pastures 
destroyed by the nomads. The Scythian horsemen hung- upon 
the skirts of the great army, which consisted mostly of foot 
soldiers, picking off stragglers and preventing foraging; and 
they did their best to persuade the Ionian Greeks, who had 
made and were guarding the bridge across the Danube, to break 
up the bridge, and so ensure the destruction of Darius. So 
long as Darius continued to advance, however, the loyalty of 
his Greek allies remained unshaken. 

But privation, fatigue, and sickness hindered and crippled 
the Persian army; Darius lost many stragglers and consumed 
his supplies, and at last the melancholy conviction dawned upon 
him that a retreat across the Danube was necessary to save 
him from complete exhaustion and defeat. 

In order to get a start in his retreat he sacrificed his sick and 
wounded. He had these men informed that he was about to 
attack the Scythians at nightfall, and under this pretence stole 
out of the camp with the pick of his troops and made off south- 
ward, leaving the camp fires burning and the usual noises and 
movements of the camp behind him. Next day the men left 
in the camp realized the trick their monarch had played upon 
them, and surrendered themselves to the mercy of the Scythians ; 
but Darius had got his start, and was able to reach the bridge 
of boats before his pursuers came upon him. They were more 
mobile than his troops, but they missed their quarry in the 
darkness. At the river the retreating Persians "were brought 
to an extremity of fear," for they found the bridge partially 
broken down and its northern end destroyed. 

At this point a voice echoes down the centuries to us. We 
see a group of dismayed Persians standing about the Great 
King upon the bank of the streaming river ; we see the masses 
of halted troops, hungry and war-worn; a trail, of battered 
transport stretches away towards the horizon, upon which at 
any time the advance gaiards of the pursuers may appear. There 
is not much noise in spite of the multitude, but rather an in- 
quiring silence. Standing out like a pier from the further side 
of the gi'eat stream are the remains of the bridge of boats, an 



278 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

enigma. . . . We cannot discern whether there are men over 
there or not. The shipping of the Ionian Greeks seems still to 
be drawn up on the further shore, but it is all very far away. 

"^ow there was with Darius an Eg}'ptian who had a voice 
louder than that of any other man on earth, and this man Darius 
ordered to take his stand upon the bank of the Ister (Danube) 
and to call Histia?us of Miletus." 

This worthy — a day is to come, as we shall presently tell, 
when his decapitated head will be sent to Darius at Susa — 
appears approaching slowly across the waters in a boat. 

There is a parley, and we gather that it is "all right." 

The explanation Histiasus has to make is a complicated one. 
Some Scythians have been and have gone again. Scouts, per- 
haps, these were. It would seem there had been a discussion 
between the Scythians and the Greeks. The Scythians wanted 
the bridge broken down ; they would then, they said, undertake 
to finish up the Persian army and make an end of Darius and 
his empire, and the Ionian Greeks of Asia could then free 
their cities again. Miltiades, the Athenian, was for accepting 
this proposal. But Histiseus had been more subtle. He would 
prefer, he said, to see the Persians completely destroyed before 
definitely abandoning their cause. Would the Scythians go 
back and destroy the Persians to make sure of them while the 
Greeks on their part destroyed the bridge? Anyhow, which- 
ever side the Greeks took finally, it was clear to him that it 
would be wise to destroy the northern end of the bridge, because 
otherwise the Scythians might rush it. Indeed, even as they 
parleyed the Greeks set to w^ork to demolish the end that linked 
them to the Scythians as quickly as possible. In accordance 
with the suggestions of Histiieus the Scythians rode off in search 
of the Persians, and so left the Greeks safe in either event. 
If Darius escaped, they could be on his side ; if he were 
destroyed, there was nothing of which the Scythians could 
complain. 

Histiseus did not put it quite in that fashion to Darius. He 
had at least kept the shipping and most of the bridge. He 
represented himself as the loyal friend of Persia, and Darius 
was not disposed to be too critical. The Ionian ships came 
over. With a sense of immense relief the remnant of the 
wasted Persians were presently looking back at the steely flood 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 279 

of the Danube streaming wide between themselves and their 
pursuers. . . . 

The pleasure and interest had gone out of the European 
expedition for Darius. He returned to Susa, leavino- an army 
in Thrace, under a trusted general Megabazus. This Mega- 
bazus set himself to the subjugation of Thrace, and among other 
states which submitted reluctantly to Darius was a kingdom, 
which thus comes into our history for the first time, the kingdom 
of Macedonia, a country inhabited by a people so closely allied 
to the Greeks that one of its princes had already been allowed 
to compete and take a prize in the Olympian games. 

Darius was disposed to reward Histiseus by allowing him 
to build a city for himself in Thrace, but Megabazus had a dif- 
ferent opinion of the trustworthiness of Histiseus, and pre- 
vailed upon the king to take him to Susa, and, under the title 
of councillor, to keep him a prisoner there. Histiseus was at 
first fiattered by this court position, and then realized its true 
meaning. The Persian court bored him, and he grew homesick 
for Miletus. He set himself to make mischief, and was able 
to stir up a revolt against the Persians among the Ionian Greeks 
on the mainland. The twistings and turnings of the story, which 
included the burning of Sardis by the lonians and the defeat 
of a Greek fieet at the battle of Lade (495 b.c), are too com- 
plicated to follow here. It is a dark and intricate story of 
treacheries, cruelties, and hate, in which the death of the wily 
Histiseus shines almost cheerfully. The Persian governor of 
Sardis, through which town he was being taken on his way back 
to Susa as a prisoner, having much the same opinion of him 
as Megabazus had, and knowing his ability to humbug Darius, 
killed him there and then^ and sent on the head only to his 
master. 

Cyprus and the Greek islands were dragged into this contest 
that Histiseus had stirred up, and at last Athens. Darius 
realized the error he had made in turning to the right and not 
to the left when he had crossed the Bosphorus, and he now 
set himself to the conquest of all Greece. He began with the 
islands. Tyre and Sidon were subject to Persia, and ships of 
the Phoenician and of the Ionian Greeks provided the Persians 
with a fieet by means of which one Greek island after another 
was subjugated. 



280 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



The first attack upon Greece pi-oper was made in 490 B.C. It 
was a sea attack upon Athens, with a force lonsj and carefully 
prepared for the task, the fleet being provided with specially 



m-cWARS cPt£c GREEKS emd TER5IAK5<' 



TIurniqpyL-:: 




built transports for the conveyance of horses. This expedition 
made a landing near Marathon in Attica. The Persians were 
guided into Marathon by a renegade Greek, Hippias, the son 
of Peisistratus, who had been tyrant of Athens. If Athens 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 281 

fell, then Ilippias was to be its tyrant, under the protection 
of the Persians. Meanwhile, so urgent was the sense of a 
crisis in the affairs of Hellas, that a man^ a herald and runner, 
went from Athens to Sparta, forgetful of all feuds, to say: 
"Lacedemonians, the Athenians make request of you to come to 
their help, and not to allow a city most anciently established 
among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the means of Bar- 
barians ; for even now Eretria has been enslaved and Hellas has 
become the weaker by a city of renown." This man, Pheidip- 
pides, did the distance from Athens to Sparta, nearly a hundred 
miles as the crow flies, and much more if we allow for the 
contours and the windings of the way, in something under 
eight and forty hours. 

But before the Spartans could arrive on the scene the battle 
was joined. The Athenians charged the enemy. They fought 
— ''in a memorable fashion : for they were the first of all the 
Hellenes about whom we know who went to attack the enemy 
at a run, and they were the first also who endured to face the 
Median garments and the men who wore them, whereas up to 
this time the very name of the Medes was to the Hellenes a 
terror to hear." 

The Persian wings gave before this impetuous attack, but 
the centre held. The Athenians, however, were cool as well 
as vigorous; they let the wings run and closed in on the flanks 
of the centre, whereupon the main body of the Persians fled 
to their ships. Seven vessels fell into the hands of the Athe- 
nians ; the rest got away, and, after a futile attempt to sail 
round to Athens and seize the city before the army returned 
thither, the fleet made a retreat to Asia. Let Herodotus close 
the story with a paragraph that still further enlightens us upon 
the tremendous prestige of the Medes at this time : 

"Of the Lacedemonians there came to Athens two thousand 
after the full moon, making gi-eat haste to be in time, so that 
they arrived in Attica on the third day after leaving Sparta: 
and though they had come too late for the battle, yet they de- 
sired to behold the Medes; and accordingly they went on to 
Marathon and looked at the bodies of the slain : then afterwards 
they departed home, commending the Athenians and the work 
which they had done." 



282 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



§ 

So Greece, unified for a while by fear, gained her first victory 
over Persia. The news came to Darius simultaneously with 
the news of a rebellion in 
Egypt, and he died while still 
undecided in which direction 
to turn. His son and succes- 
sor, Xerxes, turned first to 
Egypt and set up a Persian 
satrap there; then for four 
years he prepared a second 
attack upon Greece. Says 
Herodotus, who was, one must 
remember, a patriotic Greek, 
approaching now to the climax 
of his History : 

''For what nation did 
Xerxes not lead out of Asia 
against Hellas ? and what 
water was not exhausted, 
being drank by his host, ex- 
cept only the great rivers? 
For some supplied ships, and 
others were appointed to serve 
in the land army ; to some it 
was appointed to furnish 
cavalry, and to others vessels 
to carry horses^ while they 
served in the expedition them- 
selves also ; others were or- 
dered to furnish ships of war 
for the bridges, and others 
again ships with provisions." 

Xerxes passed into Europe, 
not as Darius did at the half- 
mile crossing of the Bos- 
phorus, but at the Hellespont 

(= the Dardanelles). In his account of the assembling of the 
great army, and its march from Sardis to the Hellespont, the 
poet in Herodotus takes possession of the historian. The great 




li/Commvznt of J^ikczvUn fact 
soldier, fovaiA ticar IVlaraHion^ 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 28S 

host passes in splendour by Troy, and Xerxes, who although a 
Persian and a Barbarian, seems to have had the advantages of a 
classical education, turns aside, says our historian, to visit the 
citadel of Priam. The Hellespont was bridged at Abydos, and 
upon a hill was set a marble throne from which Xerxes sur- 
veyed the whole array of his forces. 

"And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships 
and all the shores and the plains of Abydos full of men, then 
Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he 
fell to weeping. Artabanus, his uncle, therefore perceiving 
him — the same who at first boldly declared his opinion advising 
Xerxes not to march against Hellas — this man, I say, having 
observed Xerxes wept, asked as follows: *0 king, how far 
different from one another are the things which thou hast 
done now and a short while before now ! for having pronounced 
thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.' He said : 
'Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to 
feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, 
seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a 
hundred years have gone by.' " 

This may not be exact history, but it is great poetry. It is 
as splendid as anything in The Dynasts. 

The Persian fleet, coasting from headland to headland, ac- 
companied this land multitude during its march southward ; but 
a violent storm did the fleet great damage and 400 ships were 
lost, including much com transport. At first the united Hellenes 
marched out to meet the invaders at the Vale of Tempe near 
Mount 01}Tiipus, but afterwards retreated through Thessaly, 
and chose at last to await the advancing Persians at a place 
called Thermopylae, where at that time — 2,300 years have 
altered these things greatly — there was a great cliff on the land- 
ward side and the sea to the east, with a track scarcely wide 
enough for a chariot between. The great advantage to the 
Greeks of this position at Thermopylae was that it prevented the 
use of either cavalry or chariots, and narrowed the battle front 
so as to minimize their numerical inequality. And there the 
Persians joined battle with them one summer day in the year 
480 B.C. 

For three days the Greeks held this gi-eat army, and did 
them much damage with small loss to themselves, and then 
on the third day a detachment of Persians appeared upon the 



284 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

rear of the Greeks, having learnt of a way over the mountains 
from a peasant. There were hasty discussions among the Greeks ; 
some were for withdrawing, some for holding out. The leader 
of the whole force, Leonidas, was for staying; and with him 
he would keep, he said, 300 Spartans. The rest of the Greek 
army could, meanwhile, make good its retreat to the next de- 
fensible pass. The Thespian contingent of 700, however, re- 
fused to fall back. They preferred to stay and die with the 
Spartans. Also a contingent of 400 Thebans remained. As 
Thebes afterwards joined the Persians, there is a story that 
these Thebans were detained by force against their will, which 
seems on military as well as historical grounds improbable. 
These 1,400 stayed, and were, after a conflict of heroic quality, 
slain to a man. Two Spartans happened to be away, sick with 
ophthalmia. When they heard the news, one was too ill to 
move ; the other made his helot guide him to the battle, and 
there struck blindly until he was killed. The other, Aristo- 
demus, was taken away with the retreating troops, and returned 
to Sparta, where he was not actually punished for his conduct, 
but was known as Tresas, "'the man who retreated." It was 
enough to distinguish him from all other Spartans, and he got 
himself killed at the Battle of Platsea a year later, performing- 
prodigies of reckless courage. . . . For a whole day this little 
band had held the pass, assailed in front and rear by the whole 
force of the Persians. They had covered the retreat of the 
main Greek army, they had inflicted great losses on the in- 
vaders, and they had raised the prestige of the Greek warrior 
over that of the Mede higher even than the victory of Marathon 
had done. 

The Persian cavalry and transport filtered slowly through 
the narrow passage of Thermopylae, and marched on towards 
Athens, while a series of naval encounters went on at sea. The 
Hellenic fleet retreated before the advance of the Persian ship- 
ping, which suffered seriously through its comparative igTiorance 
of the intricate coasts and of the tricks of the local weather. 
Weight of numbers carried the Persian army forward to 
Athens; now that Thermopylae was lost, there was no line of 
defence nearer than the Isthmus of Corinth, and this meant 
the abandonment of all the intervening territory, including 
Athens. The population had either to fly or submit to the 
Persians. Thebes with all Boeotia submitted, and was pressed 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 285 

into the Persian army, except one town, Plataea, whose in- 
habitants fled to Athens. The turn of Athens came next, and 
great efforts were made to persuade her to make terms ; but, 
instead, the whole population determined to abandon everything 
and take to the shipping. The women and non-combatants were 
carried to Salamis and various adjacent islands. Only a. few 
people too old to move and a few dissentients remained in the 
town^ which was occupied by the Persians and burnt. The 
sacred objects, statues, etc., which were burnt at this time, were 
afterwards buried in the Acropolis by the returning Athenians, 
and have been dug up in our own day with the marks of burn- 
ing visible upon them. Xerxes sent off a mounted messenger 
to Susa with the news, and he invited the sons of Peisistratus, 
whom he had brought back with him, to enter upon their in- 
heritance and sacrifice after the Athenian manner upon the 
Acropolis. 

Meanwhile, the Hellenic confederate fleet had come round to 
Salamis, and in the council of war there were bitter differences 
of opinion. Corinth and the states behind the Isthmus wanted 
the fleet to fall back to that position, abandoning the cities of 
Megara and ^Egina. Themistocles insisted with all his force 
on fighting in the narrows of Salamis. The majority was 
steadily in favour of retreat, when there suddenly arrived the 
news that retreat was cut off. The Persians had sailed round 
Salamis .and held the sea on the other side. This news was 
brought by that Aristides the Just, of whose ostracism we have 
already told ; his sanity and eloquence did much to help 
Themistocles to hearten the hesitating commanders. These two 
men had formerly been bitter antagonists ; but, with a generos- 
ity rare in those days, they forgot their differences before the 
common danger. At dawn the Greek ships pulled out to battle. 

The fleet before them was a fleet more composite and less 
united than their own. But it was about three times as great. 
On one wing were the Phoenicians, on the other Ionian Greeks 
from Asia and the Islands. Some of the latter fought stoutly ; 
others remembered that they, too, were Greeks. The Greek ships, 
on the other hand, were mostly manned by freemen fighting for 
their homes. Throughout the early hours the battle raged con- 
fusedly. Then it became evident to Xerxes, watching the combat, 
that his fleet was attempting flight. The flight became disaster. 

Xerxes had taken his seat to watch the battle. He saw his 



286 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



galleys rammed by the sharp prows of other galleys ; his fight- 
ing-men shot down ; his ships boarded. Much of the sea-fighting 
in those days was done by ramming ; the big galleys bore down 
their opponents by snperior weight of impact, or sheared off 
their oars and so destroyed their manoeuvring power and left 
them helpless. Presently, Xerxes saw that some of his broken 



SoULzvs of i^ A 



CFrcmn, Bneze ih. ihz 
aiidierijce hall of 
Darius at Susa..") 




were surrendering. In the water he could see the heads 
of Greeks swimming to land ; but "of the Barbarians the greater 
number perished in the sea, not knowing how to swim." The 
clumsy attempt of the hard-pressed first line of the Persian 
fleet to put about led to indescribable confusion. Some were 
rammed by the rear ships of their own side. This ancient ship- 
ping was poor, unseaworthy stuff by any modern standards. 
The west wind was blowing and many of the broken ships of 
Xerxes were now drifting away out of his sight to be wrecked 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 



287 



on the coast beyond. Others were being towed towards Salamis 
by the Greeks. Others, less injured and still in fighting trim, 
were making for the beaches close beneath him that would bring 
them under the protection of his army. Scattered over the 
further sea, beyond the headlands, remote and vague, w^ere ships 
in flight and Greek ships in pursuit. Slowly, incident by in- 
cident, the disaster had unfolded under his eyes. We can 
imagine something of the coming and going of messengers, the 
issuing of futile orders, the changes of plan, throughout the 
day. In the morning Xerxes had come out provided with tables 
to mark the most successful of his commanders for reward. In 
the gold of the sunset he beheld the sea power of Persia utterly 
scattered, sunken and destroyed, and the Greek fleet over against 



rdizioj 'to 

HSRODOTOS 




Salamis unbroken and triumphant, ordering its ranks, as if 
still incredulous of victory. 

The Persian army remained as if in indecision for some days 
close to the scene of this sea fight, and then began to retreat to 
Thessaly, where it was proposed to winter and resume the cam- 
paign. But Xerxes, like Darius I before him, had conceived a 
disgust for European campaigns. He was afraid of the de- 
struction of the bridge of boats. With part of the army he went 
on to the Hellespont, leaving the main force in Thessaly under 
a general, Mardonius. Of his own retreat the historian relates : 

''Whithersoever they came on the march and to whatever 
nation they seized the crops of that people and used them for 
provisions ; and if they found no crops, then they took the grass 



288 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

which was growing up from the earth, and stripped off the bark 
from the trees and phicked down the leaves and devoured them ; 
alike of the cultivated trees and of those growing wild ; and they 
left nothing behind them : thus they did by reason of famine. 
Then plague too seized upon the army and dysentery, which de- 
stroyed them by the way, and some of them also who were sick 
the king left behind, laying charge upon the cities where at the 
time he chanced to be in his march, to take care of them and 
support them ; of these he left some in Thessaly, and some at 
Siris in Paionia, and some in Macedonia. . . . When, passing 
on from Thrace they came to the passage, they crossed over the 
Hellespont in haste to Abydos by means of the ships, for they 
did net find the floating bridges still stretched across, but 
broken up by a storm. While staying there for a time they had 
distributed to them an allowance of food more abundant than 
they had had by the way, and from satisfying their hunger with- 
out restraint and also from the changes of water there died many 
of those in the army who had remained safe till then. The 
rest arrived with Xerxes at Sardis." 

§ 10 

The rest of the Persian anny remained in Thessaly under 
the command of Mardonius, and for a year he maintained an 
aggressive compaign against the Greeks. Finally, he was de- 
feated and killed in a pitched battle at Platsea (479 B.C.), and 
on the same day the Persian fleet and a land army met with 
joint disaster under the shadow of Mount Mycale on the Asiatic 
mainland, between Ephesus and Miletus. The Persian ships, 
being in fear of the Greeks, had been drawn up on shore and 
a wall built about them ; but the Greeks disembarked and 
stormed this enclosure. They then sailed to the Hellespont 
to destroy what was left of the bridge of boats, so that later 
the Persian fugitives, retreating from Plata^a, had to cross 
by shipping at the Bosphorus, and did so with difficulty. 

Encouraged by these disasters of the imperial power, says 
Herodotus, the Ionian cities in Asia began for a second time 
to revolt against the Persians. 

With this the ninth book of the History of Herodotus comes 
to an end. ECe was bora about 484 e.g., so that at the time 
of the battle of Plataea he was a child, of five years old. Much 



THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS 289 

of the substance of his story was gathered by him from actors 
in, and eye-witnesses of, the great events he rehites. The war 
still dragged on for a long time; the Greeks supported a re- 
bellion against Persian rule in Egypt, and tried unsuccessfully 
to take Cyprus ; it did not end until about 449 B.C. Then the 
Greek coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek cities in the Black 
Sea remained generally free, but Cyprus and Egypt continued 
under Persian rule. Herodotus, who had been born a Persian 
subject in the Ionian city of Halicarnassus, was five and thirty 
years old by that time, and he must have taken an early op- 
portunity after this peace of visiting Babylon and Persia. He 
probably v/ent to Athens, with his History ready to recite, 
about 438 b.c. 

The idea of a great union of Greece for aggression against 
Persia was not altogether strange to Herodotus. Some of his 
readers sus])ect him of writiTig to enforce it. It was certainly 
in the air at that time. He describes Aristagoras, the son-in- 
law of Histiseus, as showing the Spartans "a tablet of bronze 
on which was engraved a map of the whole earth with all the 
seas and rivers." He makes Aristagoras say: "These Bar- 
barians are not valiant in fight. You, on the other hand, have 
now attained to the utmost skill in war. They fight with bows 
and arrows and a short spear: they go into battle wearing 
trousers and having caps on their heads. You have perfected 
your weapons and discipline. They are easily to be conquered. 
Not all the other nations of the world have what they possess; 
gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves; 
all this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired." 
It was a hundred years before these suggestions bore fruit, 
Xerxes was murdered in his palace about 465 B.C., and there- 
after Persia made no further attempts at conquest in Europe. 
We have no such knowledge of the things that were happening 
in the empire of the Great King as we have of the occurrences 
in the little states of Central Greece. Greece had suddenly her 
gim to produce literature, and put itself upon record as no other 
nation had ever done hitherto. After 479 b.c. (Platsea) the 
spirit seems to have gone out of the government of the Medes 
and Persians. The empire of the Great King enters upon a 
period of decay. An Artaxerxes, a second Xerxes, a second 
Darius, pass across the stage; there are rebellions in 
Egypt and Syria; the Medes rebel; a second Arta- 



290 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

xerxes and a second Cyrus, his brother, fight for the throne. 
This history is even as the history of Babylonia, Assyria, and 
Egypt in the older times. It is autocracy reverting to its nor- 
mal state of palace crime, blood-stained mag-nificence, and moral 
squalor. But the last-named struggle produced a Greek master- 
piece, for this second Cyrus collected an army of Greek mer- 
cenaries and marched into Babylonia, and was there killed at 
the moment of victory over Artaxerxes II. Thereupon, the 
Ten Thousand Greeks, left with no one to employ them, made 
a retreat to the coast again (401 e.g.), and this retreat was 
immortalized in a book, one of the first of personal war books, 
the Anabasis, by their leader Xenophon. 

Murders, revolts, chastisements, disasters, cunning alliances, 
and base betrayals, and no Herodotus to record them. Such is 
the texture of Persian history. An Artaxerxes III, covered 
with blood, flourishes dimly for a time. "Artaxerxes III is 
said to have been murdered by Bagoas, who places Arses, the 
youngest of the king's sons, on the throne only to slay him 
in turn when he seemed to be contemplating independent ac- 
tion." ^ So it goes on. 

Athens, prospering for a time after the Persian repulse, was 
smitten by the plague in which Pericles, its greatest ruler, died 
(428 B.C.). But, as a noteworthy fact amidst these confusions, 
the Ten Thousand of Xenophon were scattering now among 
the Greek cities, repeating from their own experience the 
declaration of Aristagoras that the Persian empire was a rich 
confusion which it would be very easy for resolute men to 
conquer. 

* Winckler, in Helmolt's Universal History. 



XXII 

GREEK THOUGHT IN RELATION TO HUMAN 
SOCIETY 

1. The Athens of Pericles. § 2. Socrates. § 3. Plato and 
the Academy. § 4. Aristotle and the Lyceum. § 5. Phi- 
losophy becomes Univorldly. § 6. The Quality and Limita- 
tions of Greek Thought. 



GREEK history for the next forty years after Plataea and 
Mycale is a story of comparative peace and tranquillity. 
There were wars, but they were not intense wars. For 
a little while in Athens, for a section of the prosperous, there 
was leisure and opportunity. And by a combination of acci- 
dents and through the character of a small group of people, 
this leisure and opportunitj^ produced the most memorable re- 
sults. Much beautiful literature was produced; the plastic 
arts flourished, and the foundations of modern science, 
already laid by the earlier philosophers of the Ionian Greek 
cities, were consolidated. Then, after an interlude of fifty odd 
years, the long-smouldering hostility between Athens and 
Sparta broke out into a fierce and exhausting war, which sapped 
at last the vitality of this creative movement. 

This war is known in history as the Peloponnesian War; it 
went on for nearly thirty years, and wasted all the power of 
Greece. At first Athens was in the ascendant, then Sparta. 
Then arose Thebes, a city not fifty miles from Athens, to over- 
shadow Sparta. Once more Athens flared into importance as 
the head of a confederation. It is a story of narrow rivalries 
and inexplicable hatreds that would have vanished long ago out 
of the memories of men, w^ere it not that it is recorded and 
reflected in a great literature. 

Through all this time Persia appears and reappears as the 
ally first of this league and then of that. About the middle of 

291 



292 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the fourth century b.c, Greece becomes aware of a new in- 
fluence in its affairs, that of Philip, King of Macedonia. Mace- 
donia does, indeed, arise in the background of this incurably 
divided Greece, as the Medes and Persians arose behind the 
Chaldean Empire. A time comes when the Greek mind turns 
round, so to speak, from its disputes, and stares in one united 
dismay at the Macedonian. 

Planless and murderous squabbles are still planless and mur- 
derous squabbles even though Thucydides tells the story, even 
though the great beginnings of a new civilization are wrecked 
by their disorders ; and in this general outline we can give 
no space at all to the particulars of these internecine feuds, to 
the fights and flights that sent first this Greek city and then 
that up to the sky in flames. Upon a one-foot globe Greece 
becomes a speck almost too small to recognize; and in a short 
history of mankind, all this century and more of dissension 
between the days of Salamis and Platiea and the rise of King 
Philip shrinks to a little, almost inaudible clash of disputa- 
tion, to a mere note upon the swift passing of opportunity 
for nations as for men. 

But what does not shrink into insignificance, because it has 
entered into the intellectual process of all subsequent nations, 
because it is inseparably a part of our mental foundation, is 
the literature that Greece produced during such patches and 
gleams of tranquillity and security as these times afforded her. 

Says Professor Gilbert Murray : ^ 

"Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other 
nations, is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and de- 
ceit. It is the inner history, the history of thought and feeling 
and character, that is so grand. They had some diflieulties to 
contend with which are now almost out of our path. They had 
practically no experience, but were doing everything for the 
first time; they were utterly weak in material resources, and 
their emotions, their 'desires and fears and rages/ were prob- 
ably wilder and fiercer than ours. Yet they produced the Athens 
of Pericles and of Plato." 

This remarkable culmination of the long-gathering creative 
power of the Greek mind, which for three and twenty centuries 
has been to men of intelligence a guiding and inspiring beacon 
out of the past, flared up after the battles of Marathon and 

^Ancient Greek Literature, by Gilbert Murray (Heinemann, 1911). 



GREEK THOUGHT 293 

Salamis had made Athens free and fearless, and, without any 
great excesses of power, predominant in her world. It was 
the work of a quite small group of men. A number of her 
citizens lived for the better part of a generation under con- 
ditions which, in all ages, have disposed men to produce good 
and beautiful work ; they were secure, they were free, and they 
had pride; and they were without that temptation of appar- 
ent and unchallenged power which disposes all of us to inflict 
wrongs upon our fellow men. When political life narrowed 
dowTi again to the waste and crimes of a fratricidal war with 
Sparta, there was so broad and well-fed a flame of intellectual 
activity burning that it lasted through all the windy distresses 
of this war and beyond the brief lifetime of Alexander the 
Great, for a period altogether of more than a hundred years 
after the wars began. 

Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly won, 
the people of Athens did for a time rise towards nobility. Un- 
der the guidance of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief offi- 
cial of the Athenian general assembly, and a politician states- 
man rather of the calibre of Gladstone or Lincoln in modern 
history, they were set to the task of rebuilding their city and 
expanding their commerce. For a time they were capable of 
following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a 
generous leader. In Pericles there was mingled in the strang- 
est fashion political ability with a real living passion for deep 
and high and beautiful things. He kept in power for over 
thirty years. He was a man of extraordinary vigour and lib- 
erality of mind. He stamped these qualities upon his time. 
As Winckler has remarked, the Athenian democracy had for 
a time "the face of Pericles." He was sustained by what was 
probably a very great and noble friendship. There was a woman 
of unusual education, Aspasia, from Miletus, whom he could 
not marry because of the law that restricted the citizenship of 
Athens to the home-born, but who was in effect his wife. She 
played a large part in gathering about him men of unusual 
gifts. All the great writers of the time knew her, and sev- 
eral have praised her wisdom. Plutarch, it is true, accuses 
her of instigating a troublesome and dangerous but finally suc- 
cessful war against Samos, but, as he himself shows later, this 
was necessitated by the naval hostility of the Samians, which 



2!94 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

threatened the overseas trade of Athens, upon which all the 
prosperity of the republic depended. 

Men's ambitions are apt to reflect the standards of their in- 
timates. Pericles was content, at any rate, to serve as a leader 
in Athens rather than to dominate as a tyrant. Alliances were 
formed under his guidance, new colonies and trading stations 
were established from Italy to the Black Sea ; and the treasures 
of the league at Delos were brought to Athens. Convinced of 
his security from Persia, Pericles spent the war hoard of the 
allies upon the beautification of his city. This was an unright- 
eous thing to do by our modern standards, but it was not a 
base or gi*eedy thing to do. Athens had accomplished the work 
of the Deli an League, and is not the labourer worthy of his 
hire? This sequestration made a time of exceptional oppor- 
tunity for architects and artists. The Parthenon of Athens, 
whose ruins are still a thing of beauty, was but the crown set 
upon the clustering glories of the Athens Pericles rebuilt. Such 
sculptures as those of Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus that still 
survive, witness to the artistic quality of the time. 

The reader must bear in mind that illuminating remark of 
Winckler's, which says that this renascent Athens bore for a 
time the face of Pericles. It was the peculiar genius of this 
man and of his atmosphere that let loose the genius of men 
about him, and attracted men of great intellectual vigour to 
Athens. Athens wore his face for a time as one wears a mask, 
and then became restless and desired to put him aside. There 
was very little that was great and generous about the common 
Athenian. We have told of the spirit of one sample voter for 
the ostracism of Aristides, and Lloyd (in his Age of Pericles) 
declares that the Athenians would not suffer the name of 
Miltiades to be mentioned in connection with the battle of 
Marathon. The sturdy self-respect of the common voters re- 
volted presently against the beautiful buildings rising about 
them; against the favours shown to such sculptors as Phidias 
over popular worthies in the same line of business ; against 
the donations made to a mere foreigner like Herodotus of 
Halicamassus ; against the insulting preference of Pericles 
for the company and conversation of a Milesian woman. The 
public life of Pericles was conspicuously orderly, and that pres- 
ently set the man in the street thinking that his private life 
must be very corrupt. One gathers that Pericles was "superior" 



GREEK THOUGHT 295 

in his demeanour; he betrayed at times a contempt for the 
citizens he served. 

"Pericles acquired not only an elevation of sentiment, and 
a loftiness and purity of style far removed from the low ex- 
pression of the vulgar, but likewise a gravity of countenance 
which relaxed not into laughter, a firm and even tone of voice, 
an easy deportment, and a decency of dress which no vehemence 
of speaking ever put into disorder. These things, and others 
of a like nature, excited admiration in all that saw him. Such 
was his conduct, when a vile and abandoned fellow loaded him 
a whole day with reproaches and abuse ; he bore it with patience 
and silence, and continued in public for the despatch of some 
urgent affairs. In the evening he walked softly home, this 
impudent wretch following, and insulting him all the way with 
the most scurrilous language. And as it was dark when he 
came to his own door, he ordered one of his servants to take 
a torch and light the man home. The poet Ion, however, says 
he was proud and supercilious in conversation, and that there 
was a great deal of vanity and contempt of others mixed with 
his dignity of manner. . . . He appeared not in the streets 
except when he went to the forum or the senate house. He 
declined the invitations of his friends, and all social entertain- 
ments and recreations; insomuch that in the whole time of his 
administration, which was a considerable length, he never went 
to sup with any of his friends but once, which was at the mar- 
riage of his nephew Euryptolemus, and he stayed there only 
until the ceremony of libation was ended. He considered 
that the freedom of entertainments takes away all distinction 
of office, and that dignity is but little consistent with 
familiarity. . . ." ^ 

There was as yet no gutter journalism to tell the world of 
the vileness of the conspicuous and successful ; but the com- 
mon man, a little out of conceit with himself, found much con- 
solation in the art of comedy, which flourished exceedingly. The 
writers of comedy satisfied that almost universal craving for 
the depreciation of those whose apparent excellence offends 
our self-love. They threw dirt steadily and industriously at 
Pericles and his friends. Pericles was portrayed in a helmet; 
a helmet became him, and it is to be feared he knew as much. 
This led to much joy and mirth over the pleasant suggestion 
* Plutarch. 



296 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



afihc 



of a frightfully distorted head, an onion head. The "goings 
on" of Aspasia were of conrse a fruitful vineyard for the in- 
ventions of the street. . . . 

Dreaming souls, weary of the vulgarities of our time, have 
desired to be transferred to the sublime Age of Pericles. But, 
plumped down into that Athens, they would have found them- 
selves in very much the at- 
mosphere of the lower sort of 
contemporary music-hall, very 
much in the vein of our popu- 
lar newspapers ; the same hot 
blast of braying libel, foul im- 
putation, greedy "patri- 
otism," and general baseness 
would have blown upon them, 
the "modern note" would 
have pursued them. As the 
memories of Platsea and 
Salamis faded and the new 
buildings grew familiar, 
Pericles and the pride of 
Athens became more and 
more offensive to the homely 
humour of the crowd. He 
was never ostracized — his 
prestige with the quieter citi- 
^ zens saved him from that ; but 
he was attacked with increas- 
ing boldness and steadfast- 
ness. He lived and died a poor man ; he was perhaps the most 
honest of demagogues ; but this did not save him from an 
abortive prosecution for peculation. Defeated in that, his 
enemies resorted to a more devious method ; they began to lop 
away his friends. 

Religious intolerance and moral accusations are the natural 
weapons of the envious against the leaders of men. His friend 
Damon was ostracized. Phidias was attached for impiety. On 
the shield of the great statue of the goddess Athene, Phidias 
had dared to put, among the combatants in a fight between 
Greeks and Amazons, portraits of Pericles and himself. Phidias 
died in prison. Anaxagoras, a stranger welcomed to Athens 




GREEK THOUGHT 297 

by Pericles — when there were plenty of honest fellows already 
there quite willing- to satisfy any reasonable curiosities — was 
saying the strangest things about the sun and stars, and hint- 
ing not obscurely that there were no gods, but only one animat- 
ing spirit (nous) in the world. ^ The comedy writers suddenly 
found the,y had deep religious feelings that could be profoundly 
and even dangerously shocked, and Anaxagoras fled the threat 
of a prosecution. Then came the turn of Aspasia. Athens 
seemed bent upon deporting her, and Pericles was torn be- 
tween the woman who was the soul of his life and the un- 
gracious city he had saved, defended, and made more beautiful 
and unforgettable than any other city in history. He stood up 
to defend Aspasia, he was seized by a storm of very human 
emotion, and as he spoke he wept — a gleeful thing for the 
rabble. His tears saved Aspasia for a time. 

The Athenians were content to humiliate Pericles, but he 
had served them so long that they were indisposed to do without 
him. He had been their leader now for a third of a century. 

In 431 B.C. came the war with Sparta. Plutarch accuses 
Pericles of bringing it on, because he felt his popularity waned 
so fast that a war was needed to make him indispensable. 

"And as he himself was become obnoxious to the people upon 
Phidias's account, and was afraid of being called in question 
for it, he urged on the war, which as yet was uncertain, and 
blew up that flame which till then was stifled and suppressed. 
By this means he hoped to obviate the accusations that threat- 
ened him, and to mitigate the rage of envy, because such was his 
dignity and power, that in all important afi^airs, and in every great 
danger, the republic could place its confidence in him alone." 

But the war was a slow and dangerous war, and the Athenian 
people were impatient. A certain Cleon arose, ambitious to 
oust Pericles from his leadership. There was a great clamour 
for a swift ending of the war. Cleon set out to be "the man who 
won the war." The popular poets got to work in this fashion : 

"Thou king of satyrs . . . why boast thy prowess, 
Yet shudder at the sound of sharpened swords, 
Spite of the flaming Cleon ?" 

An expedition under the leadership of Pericles was unsuc- 
cessful, and Cleon seized the opportunity for a prosecution. 
* For an account of his views, see Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy. 
Gomperz' Greek Thinkers is also a good book for tliis section. 



298 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Pericles was supended from his command and fined. The story 
goes that his oldest son — this was not the son of Aspasia, but 
of a former wife — turned against him, and pursued him with 
vile and incredible accusations. This young man was carried 
off by the plague. Then the sister of Pericles died, and then 
his last legitimate son. When, after the fashion of the time, 
he put the funeral garlands on the boy he wept aloud. Presently 
he himself took the contagion and died (428 b.c). 

The salient facts of this brief summary will serve to show 
how discordant Pericles was with much of the life of his city. 
This intellectual and artistic outbreak in Athens was no doubt 
favoured by the conditions of the time, but it was also due in 
part to the appearance of some very unusual men. It was not 
a general movement; it was the movement of a small group of 
people exceptionally placed and gifted. 

§ 2 

Another leading figure in this Athenian movement, a figure 
still more out of harmony with the life around him, and quite 
as much an original source and stimulant of the enduring great- 
ness of his age, was a man called Socrates, a son of a stone- 
mason. He was born about sixteen years later than Herodotus, 
and he was beginning to be heard of about the time when 
Pericles died. He himself wrote nothing, but it was his cus- 
tom to talk in public places. There was in those days a great 
searching for wisdom going on ; there was a various multitude 
of teachers called sophists who reasoned upon truth, beauty, and 
right living, and instructed the developing curiosities and im- 
aginations of youth. This was so because there were no great 
priestly schools in Greece. And into these discussions this 
man came, a clumsy and slovenly figure, barefooted, gathering 
about him a band of admirers and disciples. 

His method was profoundly sceptical; he believed that the 
only possible virtue was true knowledge ; he would tolerate no 
belief, no hope that could not pass the ultimate acid test. For 
himself this meant virtue, but for many of his weaker followers 
it meant the loss of beliefs and moral habits that would have 
restrained their impulses. These weaklings became self-excus- 
ing, self-indulging scoundrels. Among his young associates 
were Plato, who afterwards immortalized his method in a series 



GREEK THOUGHT 299 

of philosophical dialogues, and founded the philosophical school 
of the Academy, which lasted nine hundred years, Xenophon, of 
the Ten Thousand, who described his death, and Isocrates, one 
of the wisest of Greek political thinkers ; but there were also 
Critias, who, when Athens was utterly defeated by Sparta, 
was leader among the Thirty Tyrants appointed by the Spartans 
to keep the crushed city under; ^ Charmides, who was killed 
beside Critias when the Thirty were overthrown ; and Alcibiades, 
a brilliant and complex traitor, who did much to lead Athens 
into the disastrous expedition against Syracuse which destroyed 
her strength, who betrayed her to the Spartans, and who was 
at last assassinated while on his way to the Persian court to 
contrive mischief against Greece. These latter pupils were not 
the only young men of promise whose vulgar faith and patriotism 
Socrates destroyed, to leave nothing in its place. His most 
inveterate enemy was a certain Anytus, whose son, a devoted 
disciple of Socrates, had become a hopeless drunkard. Through 
Anytus it was that Socrates was at last prosecuted for "cor- 
rupting" the youth of Athens, and condemned to death by drink- 
ing a poisonous draught made from hemlock (399 b.c). 

His death is described with great beauty in the dialogue of 
Plato called by the name of Phcedo. 



Plato was bom 427 B.C., and he lived for eighty years. 

In mental temperament Plato was of an altogether different 

»"But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties of 
Athenian citizens that the Thirty made- war. They were not less solicitous 
to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the city, a project so 
perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and practice of Sparta, 
that they counted on the support of their foreign allies. Among the or- 
dinances which they promulgated was one, expressly forbidding any one 
'to teach the art of words.' The edict of the Thirty was, in fact, a general 
suppression of the higher class of teachers or professors, above the rank of 
the elementary (teacher of letters or) grammatist. If such an edict could 
have been maintained in force for a generation, combined with the other 
mandates of the Thirty — the city out of which Sophocles and Euripides 
had just died, and in which Plato and Isocrates were in vigorous age, would 
have been degraded to the intellectual level of the meanest community in 
Greece. It was not uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those 
assemblies wherein youths came together for the purpose of common 
training, cither intellectual or gymnastic, as well as the public banquets 
and clubs or associations, as being dangerous to his authority, tending to 
elevation of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the 
citizens." — Grote's History of Greece, 



300 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

type from Socrates. He was a most artistic and delicate writer, 
and Socrates could write nothing consecutive. He cared for 
beautiful things and Socrates despised them. He was supremely 
concerned with the ordering of public affairs and the scheming 
of happier human relationships, while Socrates, heedless of heat 
and cold and the opinion of his fellow creatures, concentrated 
his mind upon a serene disillusionment. Life, said Socrates, 
was deception ; only the Soul lived. Plato had a very great 
affection for this rugged old teacher, he found his method of 
the utmost value in disentangling and cleaning up opinions, 
and he made him the central figure of his immortal dialogues ; 
but his own tboughts and disposition turned him altogether 
away from the sceptical attitude. In many of the dialogues 
the voice is the voice of Socrates, but the thought is the thought 
of Plato. 

Plato was living in a time of doubt and questioning about 
all human relationships. In the great days of Pericles, be- 
fore 4,50 B.C., there seems to have been a complete satisfaction 
in Athens with social and political institutions. Then there 
seemed no reason for questioning. Men felt free; the com- 
munity prospered ; one suffered chiefly from jealousy. The 
History of Herodotus displays little or no dissatisfaction with 
Athenian political institutions. 

But Plato, who was born about the time Herodotus died, 
and who grew up in the atmosphere of a disastrous war and 
great social distress and confusion, was from the first face to 
face with human discord and the misfit of human institutions. 
To that challenge his mind responded. One of his earlier 
works and his latest are bold and penetrating discussions of 
the possible betterment of social relations. Socrates had taught 
him to take nothing for granted, not even the common relations 
of husband and wife or parent and child. His Republic, the 
first of all Utopian books, is a young man's dream of 
a city in which human life is arranged according to 
a novel and a better plan ; his last unfinished work, the Laws, 
is a discussion of the regulation of another such Utopia. There 
is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but it 
is a landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the develop- 
ment of mankind, this appearance of the idea of wilfully and 
completely recasting human conditions. So far mankind has 
been living by tradition under the fear of the gods. Here is 



GREEK THOUGHT 301 

a man who says boldly to our race, and as if it were a quite 
reasonable and natural thing to say, "Take hold of your lives. 
Most of these things that distress you, you can avoid; most of 
these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You can 
do as you will with them." 

One other thing besides the conflicts of the time perhaps 
stimulated the mind of Plato in this direction. In the days of 
Pericles Athens had founded many settlements overseas, and 
the setting up of these settlements had familiarized men with 
the idea that a community need not grow, it could also be made. 

Closely associated with Plato was a younger man, who later 
also maintained a school in Athens and lived to an even greater 
age. This was Isocrates. He was what we should call a pub- 
licist, a writer rather than an orator, and his peculiar work was 
to develop the idea of Herodotus, the idea of a unification of 
Greece against the Persian Empire, as a remedy for the base- 
ness and confusion of her politics and the waste and destruc- 
tion of her internecine wars. His political horizon was in 
some respects broader than Plato's, and in his later years he 
looked towards monarchy, and particularly towards the Mace- 
donian monarchy of Philip, as a more unifying and broadening 
method of government than city democracy. The same drift to 
monarchist ideas had occurred in the case of that Xenophon 
whose Anabasis we have already mentioned. In his old age 
Xenophon wrote the Cyropcedia, a "vindication both theoreti- 
cally and practically of absolute monarchy as shown in the 
organization of the Persian Empire." ^ 

§ 4 

Plato taught in the Academy. To him in his old age came 
a certain good-looking youngster from Stagira in Macedonia, 
Aristotle, who was the son of the Macedonian king's physician, 
and a man with a very different type of mind from that of 
the great Athenian. He was naturally sceptical of the imagina- 
tive will, and with a great respect for and comprehension of 
established fact. Later on, after Plato was dead, he set up 
a school at the Lyceum in Athens and taught, criticizing Plato 
and Socrates with a certain hardness. When he taught, the 
shadow of Alexander the Great lay across the freedom of 
' Mahaffv. 



302 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Greece, and he favoured slavery and constitutional kings. He 
had previously been the tutor of Alexander for several years 
at the court of Philip of Macedon. Intelligent men were 
losing heart in those days, their faith in the power of men 
to make their own conditions of life was fading. There were 
no more Utopias. The rush of events was manifestly too power- 
ful for such organized effort as was then practicable between 
men of fine intelligence. It was possible to think of recasting 
human society when human society was a little city of a few 
thousand citizens, but what was happening about them was 
something cataclysmal; it was the political recasting of the 
whole known world, of the affairs of what even then must have 
amounted to something between fifty and a hundred million 
people. It was recasting upon a scale no human mind was 
yet equipped to grasp. It drove thought back upon the idea 
of a vast and implacable Fate. It made men snatch at what- 
ever looked stable and unifying. Monarchy, for instance, for 
all its manifest vices, was a conceivable government for mil- 
lions; it had, to a certain extent, worked; it imposed a ruling 
will where it would seem that a collective will was impossible. 
This change of the general intellectual mood harmonized with 
Aristotle's natural respect for existing fact. If, on the one 
hand, it made him approve of monarchy and slavery and the 
subjection of women as reasonable institutions, on the other 
hand it made him eager to understand fact and to get some 
orderly knowledge of these realities of nature and human nature 
that were now so manifestly triumphant over the creative dreams 
of the preceding generation. He is terribly sane and luminous, 
and terribly wanting in self-sacrificial enthusiasm. He ques- 
tions Plato when Plato would exile poets from his Utopia, for 
poetry is a power; he directs his energy along a line dia- 
metrically opposed to Socrates' depreciation of Anaxagoras. 
He anticipates Bacon and the modern scientific movement in his 
realization of the importance of ordered knowledge. He set 
himself to the task of gathering together and setting down 
knowledge. He was the first natural historian. Other men 
before him had speculated about the nature of things, but he, 
with every young man he could win over to the task, set him- 
self to classify and compare things. Plato says in effect : "Let 
us take hold of life and remodel it"; this soberer successor: 
"Let us first know more of life and meanwhile serve the king." 



GREEK THOUGHT 303 

It was not so much a contradiction as an immense qualification 
of the master. 

The peculiar relation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great 
enabled him to procure means for his work such as were not 
available again for scientific inquiry for long ages. He could 
command hundreds of talents (a talent = about £240) for his 
expenses. At one time he had at his disposal a thousand men 
scattered throughout Asia and Greece, collecting matter for 
his natural history. They were, of course, very untrained obser- 
vers, collectors of stories rather than observers; but nothing 
of the kind had ever been attempted, had even been thought of, 
so far as we know, before his time. Political as well as natural 
science began. The students of the Lyceum under his direc- 
tion made an analysis of 158 political constitutions. . . . 

This was the first gleam of organized science in the world. 
The early death of Alexander and the breaking up of his empire 
almost before it had begun, put an" end to endowments on this 
scale for 2,000 years. Only in Egypt at the Alexandria Museum 
did any scientific research continue, and that only for a few 
generations. Of that we will presently tell. Fifty years 
after Aristotle's death the Lyceum had already dwindled to 
insignificance. 



The general drift of thought in the concluding years of the 
fourth century b.c. was not with Aristotle, nor towards the 
laborious and necessary accumulation of ordered knowledge. 
It is possible that without his endowments from the king he 
would have made but a small figure in intellectual history. 
Through them he was able to give his splendid intelligence sub- 
stance and effect. The ordinary man prefers easy ways so 
long as they may be followed, and is almost wilfully heedless 
whether they end at last in a cul-de-sac. Finding the stream 
of events too powerful to control at once, the generality of 
philosophical teachers drifted in those days from the scheming 
of model cities and the planning of new ways of living into the 
elaboration of beautiful and consoling systems of evasion. 

Perhaps that is putting things coarsely and unjustly. But 
let Professor Gilbert Murray speak upon this matter.^ 
^Ancient Greek Literature. 



304 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

''The Cynics cared only for virtue and the relatijon. of the 
soul to God ; the world and its learning and its honours were 
as dross to them. The Stoics and Epicureans, so far apart at 
first sight, were very similar in their ultimate aim. What they 
really cared about was ethics — the practical question how a 
man should order his life. Both, indeed, gave themselves to some 
science — the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to logic and 
rhetoric — but only as a means to an end. The Stoic tried to 
win men's hearts and convictions by sheer subtlety of abstract 
argument and dazzling sublimity of thought and expression. 
The Epicurean was determined to make Humanity go its way 
without cringing to capricious gods and without sacrificing 
Free-Will. He condensed his gospel into four maxims: ''God 
is not to be feared ; Death cannot be felt ; the Good can be won ; 
all that we dread can be borne and conquered." 

And meanwhile the stream of events flowed on, with a 
reciprocal indifference to philosophy. 

§ 6 

If the Greek classics are to be read with any benefit by mod- 
ern men, they must be read as the work of men like ourselves. 
Regard must be had to their traditions, their opportunities, and 
their limitations. There is a dis]>osition to exaggeration in all 
human admiration; most of our classical texts are very much 
mangled, and all were originally the work of human being?- in 
difficulties, living in a time of such darkness and narrowness 
of outlook as makes our own age by comparison a period of 
dazzling illumination. What we shall lose in reverence by this 
familiar treatment, we shall gain in sympathy for that group 
of troubled, uncertain, and very modern minds. The Athenian 
writers were, indeed, the first of modern men. They were 
discussing questions that we still discuss ; they began to struggle 
with the great problems that confront us to-day. Their writ- 
ings are our dawn.^ 

^ Jung in his Psychology of the Unconscious is very good in his Chapter 
I on the differences between ancient (pre-Athenian) thought and modern 
thought. The former he calls Undirected Thinking, the latter Directed 
Thinking. The former was a thinking in images, akin to dreaming; the 
latter a thinking in words. Science is an organization of directed thinking. 
The Antique spirit (before the Greek thinkers i.e.) created not science 
but mythology. The ancient human world was a world of subjective 
fantasies like the world of children and uneducated young people to-day, 



GREEK THOUGHT 305 

They began an inquiry, and they arrived at no solutions. 
We cannot pretend to-day that we have arrived at sohitions 
to most of the questions they asked. The mind of the Hebrews, 
as we have already shown, awoke suddenly to the endless 
miseries and disorders of life, saw that these miseries and 
disorders were largely due to the lawless acts of men, and con- 
cluded that salvation could come only through subduing our- 
selves to the service of the one God who rules heaven and 
earth. The Greek, rising to the same perception, was not pre- 
pared with the same idea of a patriarchal deity ; he lived in a 
world in which there was not God but the gods ; if perhaps 
he felt that the gods themselves were limited, then he thought 
of Fate behind them, cold and impersonal. So he put his 
problem in the form of an inquiry as to what was right living, 
without any definite correlation of the right-living man with 
the will of God. ... To us, looking at the matter from a 
standpoint purely historical, the common problem can now 
be presented in a form that, for the purposes of history, covers 
both the Hebrew and Greek way of putting it. We have seen 
our kind rising out of the unconsciousness of animals to a 
continuing racial self-consciousness, realizing the unhappiness 
of its wild diversity of aims, realizing the inevitable tragedy of 
individual self-seeking, and feeling its way blindly towards some 
linking and subordinating idea to save it from the pains and 
accidents of mere individuality. The gods, the god-king, the 
idea of the tribe, the idea of the city ; here are ideas that have 
claimed and held for a time the devotion of men, ideas in which 
they have a little lost their individual selfishness and escaped 
to the realization of a more enduring life. Yet, as our wars 
and disasters prove, none of these greater ideas have yet been 
great enough. The gods have failed to protect, the tribe has 
proved itself vile and cruel, the city ostracized one's best and 
truest friends, the god-king made a beast of himself. . . . 

As we read over the speculative literature of this great period 

and like the world of savaj2:es and dreams. Infantile thought and dreams 
are a re-echo of prehistoric and savage methods of thinking. Myths, 
says Jung, are the mass dreams of peoples, and dreams the myths of in- 
dividuals. We have already directed the reader's attention to the re- 
semblance of the early gods of civilization to the fantasies of children. 
The work of hard and disciplined thinking by means of carefully analyzed 
words and statements which was begun by the Greek thinkers and re- 
sumed by the scholastic philosophers of whom we shall tell in the middle 
ages, was a necessary preliminary to the development of modern science. 



306 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of the Greeks, we realize three barriers set about the Greek 
mind, from which it rarely escaped, but from which we now 
perhaps are beginning; to escape. 

The first of these limitations was the obsession of the Greek 
mind by the idea of the city as the ultimate state. In a world 
in which empire had followed empire, each greater than its pre- 
decessor, in a world through which men and ideas drove ever 
more loosely and freely, in a world visibly unifying even then, 
the Greeks, because of their peculiar physical and political cir- 
cumstances, were still dreaming impossibly of a compact little 
city state, impervious to outer influences, valiantly secure 
against the whole world. Plato's estimate of the number of citi- 
zens in a perfect state varied between 1,000 (the Republic) and 
5,040 (the Laws) citizens. ^ This state was to go to war and 
hold its own against other cities of the same size. And this 
was not a couple of generations after the hosts of Xerxes had 
crossed the Hellespont ! 

Perhaps these Greeks thought the day of world empires had 
passed for ever, whereas it was only beginning.. At the utmost 
their minds reached out to alliances and leagues. There must 
have been men at the court of Artaxerxes thinking far away 
beyond these little ideas of the rocky creek, the island, and the 
mountain-encircled valley. But the need for unification against 
the greater powers that moved outside the Greek-speaking world, 
the Greek mind disregarded wilfully. These outsiders were 
barbarians, not to be needlessly thought about ; they were barred 
out now from Greece for ever. One took Persian money ; every- 
body took Persian money ; what did it matter ? Or one en- 
listed for a time in their armies (as Xenophon did) and hoped 
for his luck with a rich prisoner. Athens took sides in Egyptian 
affairs, and carried on minor wars with Persia, but there was 
no conception of a common policy or a common future for 
Greece. . . . Until at last a voice in Athens began to shout 
"Macedonia !" to clamour like a watch-dog, "Macedonia !" This 
was the voice of the orator and demagogue, Demosthenes, hurl- 
ing warnings and threats and denunciations at King Philip 

* "For the proper administration of justice and for the distribution of 
authority it is necessary that the citizens be acquainted with each other's 
characters, so that, where this cannot be, much mischief ensues, both in 
the use of authority and in the administration of justice; for it is not 
just to decide arbitrarily, as must be the case with excessive population." 
Aristotle: Politics. 



GREEK THOUGHT 307 

of Macedon, who had learnt his politics not only from Plato 
and Aristotle, but also from Isocrates and Xenoplion, and from 
Babylon and Susa, and who was preparing quietly, ably, and 
steadfastly to dominate all Greece, and through Greece to con- 
quer the known world. . . . 

There was a second thing that cramped the Greek mind, the 
institution of domestic slavery. Slavery was implicit in Greek 
life ; men could conceive of neither comfort nor dignity without 
it. But slavery shuts off one's sympathy not only from a class 
of one's fellow subjects ; it puts the slave-owner into a class and 
organization against all stranger men. One is of an elect tribe. 
Plato, carried by his clear reason and the noble sanity of his 
spirit beyond the things of the present, would have abolished 
slavery; much popular feeling and the ISTew Comedy were 
against it; the Stoics and Epicureans, many of whom were 
slaves, condemned it as unnatural, but finding it too strong to 
upset, decided that it did not affect the soul and might be 
ignored. With the wise there was no bound or free. To the 
matter-of-fact Aristotle, and probably to most practical men, 
its abolition was inconceivable. So they declared that there 
were in the world men "naturally slaves." . . . 

Finally, the thought of the Greeks was hampered by a want 
of knowledge that is almost inconceivable to us to-day. They 
had no knowledge of the past of mankind at all; at best they 
had a few shrewd guesses. They had no knowledge of geography 
beyond the range of the Mediterranean basin and the frontiers 
of Persia. We know far more to-day of what was going on 
in Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, and Memphis in the time of 
Pericles than he did. Their astronomical ideas were still in the 
state of rudimentary speculations. Anaxagoras, greatly daring, 
thought the sun and moon were vast globes, so vast that the sun 
was probably "as big as all the Peloponnesus." Their ideas 
in physics and chemistry were the results of profound cogita- 
tion; it is wonderful that they did guess at atomic structure. 
One has to remember their extraordinary poverty in the matter 
of experimental apparatus. They had coloured glass for orna- 
ment, but no white glass ; no accurate means of measuring the 
minor intervals of time, no really efficient numerical notation, 
no very accurate scales, no rudiments of telescope or microscope. 
A modern scientific man dumped down in the Athens of Pericles 
would have found the utmost difficulty in demonstrating the 



308 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

elements of his knowledge, however crudely, to the men he would 
have found there. He would have had to rig up the simplest 
apparatus under every disadvantage, while Socrates pointed 
out the absurdity of seeking Truth with pieces of wood and 
string and metal such as small boys use for fishing. And our 
professor of science would also have been in constant danger 
of a prosecution for impiety. 

Our world to-day draws upon relatively immense accumula- 
tions of knowledge of fact. In the age of Pericles scarcely the 
first stone of cur comparatively tremendous cairn of things 
recorded and proved had been put in place. When we reflect 
upon this difference, then it ceases to be remarkable that the 
Greeks, with all their aptitude for political speculation, were 
blind to the insecurities of their civilization from without and 
from within, to the necessity for effective unification, to the 
swift rush of events that was to end for long ages these first 
brief freedoms of the human mind. 

It is net in the results it achieved, but in the attempts it 
made, that the true value for us of this group of Greek talkers 
and vvriters lies. It is not that they answered questions, but 
that they dared to ask them. J^ever before had man challenged 
his world and the way of life to which he found his birth had 
brought him. jSTever had he said before that he could alter his 
conditions. Tradition and a seeming necessity had held him 
to life as he had found it grown up about his tribe since time 
immemorial. Hitherto he had taken the world as children still 
take the hemes and habits in which they have been reared. 

So in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. we perceive, most 
plainly in Judea and in Athens, but by no means confined to 
those centres, the beginnings of a moral and an intellectual 
process in manl?;ind, an appeal to righteousness and an appeal 
to the truth from the passions and confusions and immediate 
appearances of existence. It is like the dawn of the sense of 
responsibility in a youth, who suddenly discovers that life is 
neither easy nor aimless. Mankind is growing up. The rest 
of history for three and twenty centuries is threaded with the 
spreading out and development and interaction and the clearer 
and more effective statement of these main leading ideas. Slowly 
more and more men apprehend the reality of human brother- 
hood, the needlessness of wars and cruelties and oppression, 
the possibilities of a com-mon purpose for the whole of our 



GREEK THOUGHT S09 

kind. In every generation thereafter there is the evidence 
of men seeking for that better order to which they feel our 
world must come. But everywhere and wherever in any man 
the great constructive ideas have taken hold, the hot greeds, 
the jealousies, the suspicions and impatience that are in the 
nature of every one of us, war against the struggle towards 
greater and broader purposes. The last twenty-three centuries 
of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty immortal 
to think clearly and live rightly. Blunder follows blunder; 
promising beginnings end in grotesque disappointments ; streams 
of living water are poisoned by the cup that conveys them to 
the thirsty lips of mankind. But the hope of men rises again 
at last after every disaster. . . . 

We pass on now to the story of one futile commencement, 
one glorious shattered beginning of human unity. There was 
in Alexander the Great knowledge and imaginr.tion, power and 
opportunity, folly, egotism, detestable vulgarity, and an im- 
mense promise broken by the accident of his early death while 
men were still dazzled by its immensity. 



XXIII 

THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 

1. Philip of Macedonia. § 2. The Murder of King Philip. 
§ 3. Alexander's First Conquests. § 4. The Wanderings of 
Alexander. § 5. Was Alexander Indeed Great? § 6. The 
Successors of Alexander. § 7. Pergamum a Refuge of Cul- 
ture. § 8. Alexander as a. Portent of World TJnUy. 



THE true hero of the story of Alexander is not so much 
Alexander as his father Philip. The author of a piece 
does not shine in the limelight as the actor does, and 
it was Philip who planned much of the greatness that his son 
achieved, who laid the foundations and forged the tools, who 
had indeed already begun the Persian expedition at the time 
of his death. Philip, beyond doubting, was one of the greatest 
monarchs the world has ever seen ; he was a man of the utmost 
intelligence and ability, and his range of ideas was vastly 
beyond the scope of his time. He made Aristotle his friend; 
he must have discussed with him those schemes for the organ- 
ization of real knowledge which the philosopher was to realize 
later through Alexander's endowments. Philip, so far as we 
can judge, seems to have been Aristotle's "Prince" ; to him 
Aristotle turned as men turn only to those whom they admire 
and trust. To Philip also Isocrates appealed as the gTcat leader 
who should unify and ennoble the chaotic public life of Greece. 
In many books it is stated that Philip was a man of in- 
credible cynicism and of uncontrolled lusts. It is true that at 
feasts, like all the Macedonians of his time, he was a hard 
drinker and sometimes drunken — it was probably considered 
unamiable not to drink excessively at feasts; but of the other 
accusations there is no real proof, and for evidence we have 
only the railings of such antagonists as Demosthenes, the 
Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric. 

310 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 



Si: 



The quotation of a phrase or so will serve to show to what the 
patriotic anger of Demosthenes could bring him. In one of 
the Philippics, as his denunciations of Philip are called, he 
gives vent in this style: 

"Philip — a man who not only is no Greek, and no way 
akin to the Greeks, but is not even a barbarian from a re- 
spectable country — no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country 
from which we never 
get even a decent 
slave." And so on and 
so on. We know, as a 
matter of fact, that 
the Macedonians were 
an Aryan people very 
closely akin to the 
Greeks, and that 
Philip was probably 
the best educated man 
of his time. This was 
the spirit in which the 
adverse accounts of 
Philip were written. 

When Philip be- 
came king of Mace- 
donia in 359 B.C., his 
country was a little 
country without a seaport or industries or any considerable 
city. It had a peasant population, Greek almost in lan- 
guage and ready to be Greek in sympathies, but more purely 
Nordic in blood than any people to the south of it. Philip 
made this little barbaric state into a gi-eat one; he cre- 
ated the most efficient military organization the world 
had so far seen, and he had brought most of Greece into one 
confederacy under his leadership at the time of his death. And 
his extraordinary quality, his power of thinking out beyond 
the current ideas of his time, is shown not so much in those 
matters as in the care with which he had his son trained to carry 
on the policy he had created. He is one of the few monarchs 
in history who cared for his successor. Alexander was, as few 
other monarchs have ever been, a specially educated king; 
he was educated for empire. Aristotle was but one of the sev- 




ThzU^ cf^^Lozdon 



312 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

eral able tutors his father chose for him. Philip confided his 
policy to him, and entrusted him with commands and authority 
by the time he was sixteen. He commanded the cavalry at 
Chseronea under his father's eye. He was nursed into power 
— generously and unsuspiciously. 

To any one who reads his life with care it is evident that 
Alexander started with an equipment of training and ideas 
of unprecedented value. As he got beyond the wisdom of his 
upbringing he began to blunder and misbehave — sometimes with 
a dreadful folly. The defects of his character had triumphed 
over his upbringing long before he died. 

Philip was a king after the eld pattern, a leadei^king, first 
among his peers, of the ancient ISTordic Aryan type. The army 
he found in Macedonia consisted of a general foot levy and 
a noble equestrian order called the "companions." The people 
were farmers and hunters and somewhat drunken in their 
habits, but ready for discipline and good fighting stuff. And 
if the people were homely, the government was intelligent and 
alert. For some generations the court language had been Attic 
(^ Athenian) Greek, and the court had been sufficiently civi- 
lized to shelter and entertain such great figures as Euripides, 
who died there in 406 B.C., and Zeuxis the artist. Moreover, 
Philip, before his accession, had spent some years as a hostage 
in Greece. He had had as good an education as Greece could 
give at that time. He was, therefore, quite familiar with what 
we may call the idea of Isocrates — the idea of a great union 
of the Greek states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world ; 
and he knew, too, how incapable was the Athenian democracy, 
because of its constitution and tradition, of taking the op- 
portunity that lay before it. For it was an opportunity that 
would have to be shared. To the Athenians or the Spartans 
it would mean letting in a "lot of foreigners" to the advantages 
of citizenship. It would mean lowering themselves to the level 
of equality and fellowship with Macedonians — a people from 
whom '^ive" do not get "even a decent slave." 

There was no way to secure unanimity among the Greeks 
for the contemplated enterprise except by some revolutionary 
political action. It was no love of peace that kept the Greeks 
from such an adventure ; it was their political divisions. The 
resources of the several states were exhausted in a series of 
internecine wars — wars arising out of the merest excuses and 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 



313 



fanned by oratorical wind. The plcugliina^ of certain sacred 
lands near Delphi by the Phocians was, for example, the pre- 
text fcr a sanguinary Sacred War. 

Philip's first years of kingship were devoted to the discipline 
of his army. Hitherto most of the main battle fighting in tlie 




world had been done by footmen in formation. In the very 
ancient Sumerian battle-pieces we see spearmen in close order 
forming the main battle, just as they did in the Znlu armies 
of the nineteenth century ; the Greek troops of Philip's time 
were still fighting in that same style ; the Theban phalanx was 
a mass of infantry holding spears, the hinder ranks thrusting 
their longer spears between the front-line men. Such a forma- 
tion went through anything less disciplined that opposed it. 



314 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Mounted archers could, of course, inflict considerable losses 
on. such a mass of men, and accordingly, as the horse came into 
warfare, horsemen appeared on either side as an accessory to 
this main battle. The reader must remember that the horse 
did not come into very effective use in western war until the 
rise of the Assyrians, and then at first only as a chariot horse. 
The chariots drove full tilt at the infantry mass and tried to 
break it. Unless its discipline was very solid they succeeded. 
The Homeric fighting is chariot fighting. It is not until the 
last thousand years B.C. that we begin to find mounted soldiers, 
as distinct from charioteers, playing a part in warfare. At first 
they appear to have fought in a scattered fashion, each man 
doing his personal feats. So the Lydians fought against Cyrus. 
It was Philip who seems to have created charging cavalry. 
He caused his "companions" to drill for a massed charge. 
And also he strengthened his phalanx by giving the rear men 
longer spears than had been used hitherto, and so deepening 
its mass. The Macedonian phalanx was merely a more solid 
version of the Theban phalanx. ITone of these massed in- 
fantry formations was flexible enough to stand a flank or rear 
attack. • They had very slight manoeuvring power. Both 
Philip's and his son's victories followed, therefore, with varia- 
tions, one general scheme of co-operation between these two 
arms. The phalanx advanced in the centre and held the 
enemy's main body; on one wing or the other the cavalry 
charges swept away the enemy cavalry, and then swooped round 
upc^ the flank and rear of the enemy phalanx, the front of 
which the Macedonian phalanx was already smiting. The 
enemy main battle then broke and was massacred. As Alex- 
ander's military experience grew, he also added a use of cata- 
pults in the field, big stone-throwing affairs, to break up 
the enemy infantry. Before his time catapults had been 
used in sieges, but never in battles. He invented "artillery 
preparation." 

With the weapon of his new army in his hand, Philip first 
turned his attention to the north of Macedonia. He carried 
expeditions into Illyria and as far as the Danube; he also 
spread his power along the coast as far as the Hellespont. He 
secured possession of a port, Amphipolis, and certain gold 
mines adjacent. After several Thracian expeditions he turned 
southward in good earnest. He took up the cause of the Delphic 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 315 

amphictjony against those sacrilegious Phocians, and so ap- 
peared as the champion of Hellenic religion. 

There was a strong party of Greeks, it must he understood, 
a Pan-Hellenic party, in favour of the Greek headship of Philip. 
The chief writer of this Pan-Hellenic movement was Isocrates. 
Athens, on the other hand, was the head and front of the op- 
position to Philip, and Athens was in open sympathy with 
Persia, even sending emissaries to the Great King to warn 
him of the danger to him of a united Greece. The comings 
and goings of twelve years cannot be related here. In 338 b.c. 
the long struggle between division and pan-Hellenism came to a 
decisive issue, and at the battle of Chaeronea Philip inflicted 
a crushing defeat upon Athens and her allies. He gave Athens 
peace upon astonishingly generous terms; he displayed him- 
self steadfastly resolved to propitiate and favour that im- 
placable city; and in 338 b.c. a congress of Greek states recog- 
nized him as captain-general for the war against Persia. 

He was now a man of forty-seven. It seemed as though the 
world lay at his feet. He had made his little country into 
the leading state in a great Grseco-Macedonian confederacy. 
That unification was to be the prelude to a still greater one, 
the unification of the Western world with the Persian empire 
into one world state of all known peoples. Who can doubt he 
had that dream ? The writings of Isocrates convince us that 
he had it. Who can deny that he might have realized it ? He 
had a reasonable hope of living for perhaps another quarter 
century of activity. In 336 b.c. his advanced guard crossed 
into Asia. . . . 

But he never followed with his main force. He was 
assassinated. 



It is necessary now to tell something of the domestic life of 
King Philip, The lives of both Philip and his son were per- 
vaded by the personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympias, 
the mother of Alexander. 

She was the daughter of the king of Epirus, a country to 
the west of Macedonia, and, like Macedonia, a semi-Greek land. 
She met Philip, or was thrown in his way, at some religious 
gathering in Samothrace. Plutarch declares the marriage was 



816 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 






a love-match, and there seems to be at least this much in the 
charges against Philip that, like many energetic and imaginative 
men, he was prone to impatient love impulses. He married 
her when he was already a king, and Alexander was born 
to him three years later. 

It was not* long before Olympias and Philip were bitterly 
estranged. She was jealous of him, but there was another 
and gi'aver source of trouble in her 
passion for religious mysteries. We 
have already noted that beneath the 
fine and restrained jS'ordic religion 
of the Greeks the land abounded 
with religious cults of a darker and 
more ancient kind, aboriginal cults 
with secret initiations, orgiastic 
celebrations, and often with cruel 
and obscene rites. These religions 
of the shadows, these practices of 
the women and peasants and slaves, 
gave Greece her Orphic, Dionysic, 
and Demeter cults ; they have 
lurked in the tradition of Europe 
down almost to our own times. The 
witchcraft of the Middle Ages, with 
its resort to the blood of babes, 
scraps of executed criminals, incan- 
tations and magic circles, seems to have been little else than 
the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark whites. 
In these matters Olympias was an expert and an enthusiast, 
and Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity 
by use of tame serpents in these pious exercises. The 
snakes invaded her domestic apartments, and history is not 
clear whether Philip found in them matter for exasperation 
or religious awe. These occupations of his wife must have 
been a serious inconvenience to Philip, for the Macedonian 
people were still in that sturdy stage of social development in 
which neither enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives 
are admired. 

The evidence of a bitter hostility between mother and father 
peeps out in many little things in the histories. She was evi- 
dently jealous of Philip's conquests ; she hated his fame. There 




CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT Sl7 

are many signs that Olympias did her best to set her son ag'ainst 
his father and attach him wholly to herself. A story survives 
(in Plutarch's Life) that "whenever news was brought of 
Philip's victories, the capture of a city or the winning of 
some great battle, he never seemed greatly rejoiced to hear 
it ; on the contrary he used to say to his play-fellows : Tather 
will get everything in advance, boys; he won't leave any 
great task for me to share with you.' "... 

It is not a natural thing for a boy to envy his father in 
this fashion without some inspiration. That sentence sounds 
like an echo. 

We have already pointed out how manifest it is that Philip 
planned the succession of Alexander, and how eager he vvas 
to thrust fame and power into the boy's hands. He was think- 
ing of the political structure he was building — but the mother 
was thinking of the glory and pride of that wonderful lady, 
Olympias. She masked her hatred of her husband \inder the 
cloak of a mother's solicitude for her son's future. When in 
337 B.C. Philip, after the fashion of kings in those days, mar- 
ried a second wife who was a native Macedonian, Cleopatra, "of 
whom he was passionately enamoured," Olympias made much 
trouble. 

Plutarch tells of a pitiful scene that occurred at Philip's 
marriage to Cleopatra. There was much drinking of wine at 
the banquet, and Attains, the father of the bride, being "in- 
toxicated with liquor," betrayed tlie general hostility to 
Olympias and Epirus by saying he hoped there would be a 
child by the marriage to give them a truly Macedonian heir. 
Whereupon Alexander, taut for such an insult, cried out, 
"What then am I?" and hurled his cup at Attains. Philip, 
enraged, stood up and, says Plutarch, drew his sword, only to 
stumble and fall. Alexander, blind with rage and jealousy, 
taunted and insulted his father. 

"Macedonians," he said. "See there the general who would 
go from Europe to Asia ! Why ! he cannot get from one table 
to another !" 

How that scene lives still, the sprawl, the flushed faces, the 
angry voice of the boy! Next day Alexander departed with 
his mother — and Philip did nothing to restrain them. Olympias 
went home to Epirus; Alexander departed to Illyria. Thence 
Philip persuaded him to return. 



S18 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Fresh trouble arose. Alexander had a brother of weak in- 
tellect, Aridseus, whom the Persian governor of Caria sought 
as a son-in-law. '^Alexander's friends and his mother now 
infused notions into him again, though perfectly groundless, 
that by so noble a match, and the support consequent upon it, 
Philip designed the crown for Aridseus. Alexander, in the 
uneasiness these suspicions gave him, sent one Thessalus, a 
player, into Caria, to desire the grandee to pass by Aridteus, 
who was of spurious birth, and deficient in point of under- 
standing, and to take the lawful heir to the crown into his 
alliance. Pixcdarus was infinitely more pleased with this pro- 
posal. But Philip no sooner had intelligence of it, than he 
went to Alexander's apartment, taking along with him Philotas, 
the son of Parmenio, one of his most intimate friends and 
companions, and, in his presence, reproached him with his 
degeneracy and meanness of spirit, in thinking of being son- 
in-law to a man of Caria, one of the slaves of a barbarian king. 
At the same time he wrote to the Corinthians, insisting that they 
should send Thessalus to him in chains. Harpalus and 
Niarchus, Phrygius and Ptolemy, some of the other companions 
of the prince, he banished. But Alexander afterwards recalled 
them, and treated them with great distinction." 

There is something very touching in this story of the father 
pleading with the son he manifestly loved, and bafiled by the 
web of mean suggestion which had been spun about the boy's 
imagination. 

It was at the marriage of his daughter to her uncle, the king 
of Epirus and the brother of Olympias, that Philip was stabbed. 
He was walking in a procession into the theatre unarmed, in 
a white robe, and he was cut down by one of his bodyguard. 
The murderer had a horse waiting, and would have got away, 
but the foot of his horse caught in a wild vine and he was 
thrown from the saddle by the stumble and slain by his 
pursuers. . . . 

So at the age of twenty Alexander was at the end of 
his anxiety about the succession, and established king in 
Macedonia. 

Olympias then reappeared in Macedonia, a woman proudly 
vindicated. It is said thrt she insisted upon paying the same 
funeral honours to the memory of the murderer as to Philip. 

In Greece there were great rejoicings over this auspicious 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT SI9 

event, and Demosthenes, when he had the news, ahhough it 
was but seven days after the death of his own daug-hter, went 
into the public assembly at Athens in gay attire wearing a 
chaplet. 

Whatever Olympias may have done about her husband's 
assassin, history does not doubt about her treatment of her sup- 
planter, Cleopatra. So soon as Alexander was out of the way 
— and a revolt of the hillmen in the north called at once for 
his attention — Cleopatra's newly bom child was killed in its 
mother's arms, and Cleopatra — ^no doubt after a little taunting 
■ — ^was then strangled. These excesses of womanly feeling are 
said to have shocked Alexander, but they did not prevent him 
from leaving his mother in a position of considerable authority 
in Macedonia. She wrote letters to him upon religious and 
political questions, and he showed a dutiful disposition in send- 
ing her always a la^ge share of the plunder he made. 



These stories have to be told because history cannot be un- 
derstood without them. Here was the great world of men be- 
tween India and the Adriatic ready for union, ready as it had 
never been before for a unifying control. Here was the wide 
order of the Persian empire with its roads, its posts, its gen- 
eral peace and prosperity, ripe for the fertilizing influence of 
the Greek mind. And these stories display the quality of 
the human beings to whom those great opportunities came. 
Here was this Philip who was a very great and noble man, and 
yet he was drunken, he could keep no order in his household. 
Here was Alexander in many ways gifted above any man 
of his time, and he was vain, suspicious, and passionate, with 
a mind set awry by his mother. 

We are beginning to understand something of what the 
world might be, something of what our race might become, 
were it not for our still raw humanity. It is barely a matter 
of seventy generations between ourselves and Alexander; and 
between ourselves and the savage hunters, our ancestors, who 
charred their food in the embers or ate it raw, intervene some 
four or five hundred generations. There is not much scope for 
the modification of a species in four or five hundred gen- 
erations. Make men and women only sufficiently jealous or 



320 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

fearful or drunken or angry, and the hot red eyes of the cave- 
meu will glare out at us to-day. We have writing and teach- 
ing, science and power ; we have tamed the beasts and schooled 
the lightning; but we are still only shambling towards the light. 
We have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame 
and breed ourselves. 

From the very beginning of his reigTi the deeds of Alexander 
showed how well he had assimilated his father's plans, and 
how great were his own abilities. A map of the known world 
is needed to show the course of his life. At first, after re- 
ceiving assurances from Greece that he was to be captain-gen- 
eral of the Grecian forces, he marched through Thrace to the 
Danube; he crossed the river and burnt a village, the second 
great monarch to raid the Scythian country beyond the Danube ; 
then recrossed it and marched westward and so came down by 
Illyria. By that time the city of Thebes was in rebellion, and 
his next blow was at Greece. Thebes — unsupported of course 
by Athens — ^was taken and looted; it was treated with ex- 
travagant violence; all its buildings, except the temple and 
the house of the poet Pindar, were razed, and thirty thousand 
people sold into slavery. Greece was stunned, and Alexander 
was free to go on with the Persian campaign. 

This destmction of Thebes betrayed a streak of violence in 
the new master of human destinies. It was too heavy a blow 
to have dealt. It was a barbaric thing to do. If the spirit of 
rebellion was killed, so abo was the spirit of help. The Greek 
states remained inert thereafter, neither troublesome nor help- 
ful. They would not support Alexander with their shipping, 
a thing which was to prove a very grave embarrassment to him. 

There is a story told by Plutarch about this Theban massacre, 
as if it redounded to the credit of Alexander, but indeed it 
shows only how his saner and his crazy sides were in con- 
flict. It tells of a Macedonian ofScer and a Theban lady. This 
officer was among the looters, and he entered this woman's house, 
inflicted unspeakable insults and injuries upon her, and at 
last demanded whether she had gold or silver hidden. She 
told him all her treasures had been put into the well, conducted 
him thither, and, as he stooped to peer down, pushed him sud- 
denly in and killed him by throwing great stones upon him. 
Some allied soldiers came upon this scene and took her forth- 
with to Alexander for judcnient. 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 321 

She deiied him. Already the extravagant impulse tJiat had 
ordered the massacre was upon the wane, and he not only 
spared her, but had her family and property and freedom re- 
stored to her. This Plutarch makes out to be a generosity, 
but the issue is more complicated than that. It was Alex- 
ander who was outraging and plundering and enslaving all 
Thebes. That poor crumpled Macedonian brute in the well 
had been doing only what he had been told he had full lib- 
erty to do. Is a commander first to give cruel orders, and then 
to forgive and reward those who slay his instruments ? This 
gleam of remorse at the instance of one woman who was not 
perhaps wanting in tragic dignity and beauty, is a poor set- 
off to the murder of a great city. 

Mixed with the craziness of Olympias in Alexander was 
the sanity of Philip and the teachings of Aristotle. This The- 
ban business certainly troubled the mind of Alexander. When- 
ever afterwards he encountered Thebans, he tried to show them 
special favour. Thebes, to his credit, haunted him. 

Yet the memory of Thebes did not save three other great 
cities from similar brain stonns ; Tyre he destroyed, and Gaza, 
and a city in India, in the storming of which he was knocked 
down in fair fight and wounded; and of the latter place not 
a soul, not a child, was spared. He must have been badly 
frightened to have taken so evil a revenge. 

At the outset of the war the Persians had this supreme ad- 
vantage, they were practically masters of the sea. The ship3 
of the Athenians and their allies sulked unhelpfully. Alex- 
ander, to get at Asia, had to go round by the Hellespont ; and 
if he pushed far into the Persian empire, he ran the risk of 
being cut off completely from his base. His first task, there- 
fvore, was to cripple the enemy at sea, and this he could only 
do by marching along the coast of Asia Minor and capturing 
port after port until the Persian sea bases were destroyed. If 
the Persians had avoided battle and hung upon his lengthening 
line of communications they could probably have destroyed 
him, but this they did not do. A Persian army not very much 
greater than his own gave battle on the banks of the Granicus 
(334 B.C.) and was destroyed. This left him free to take 
Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, and, after a fierce struggle, Halicar- 
nassus. Meanwhile the Persian fleet was on his right flank and 



322 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

between him and Greece, threatening mucli but accomplishing 
nothing. 

In 333 B.C., pursuing this attack upon the sea bases, he 
marched along the coast as far as the head of the gnlf now called 
the Gulf of Alexandretta. A huge Persian army, under the 
gi-eat king Darius III, was inland of his line of march, sep- 
arated from the coast by mountains, and Alexander went right 
beyond this enemy force before he or the Persians realized 
their proximity. Scouting was evidently very badly done by 
Greek and Persian alike. The Persian army was a vast, ill- 
organized assembly of soldiers, transport, camp followers, and 
so forth. Darius, for instance, was accompanied by his harem, 
and there was a gi-eat multitude of harem slaves, musicians, 
dancers, and cooks. Many of the leading officers had brought 
their families to witness the hunting down of the Macedonian 
invaders. The troops had been levied from every province in 
the empire ; they had no tradition or principle of combined 
action. Seized by the idea of cutting off Alexander from Greece, 
Darius moved this multitude over the mountains to the sea ; he 
had the luck to get through the passes without opposition, and 
he encamped on the plain of Issus between the mountains and 
the shore. And there Alexander, who had turned back to fight, 
struck him. The cavalry charge and the phalanx smashed this 
great brittle host as a stone smashes a bottle. It was routed. 
Darius escaped from his war chariot — that out-of-date instru- 
ment — and fled on horseback, leaving even his harem in the 
hands of Alexander. 

All the accounts of Alexander after this battle show him at 
his best. He was restrained and magnanimous. He treated 
the Persian princesses with the utmost civility. And he kept 
his head ; he held steadfastly to his plan. He let Darius escape, 
unpursued, into Syria, and he continued his march upon the 
naval bases of the Persians — that is to say, upon the Phoenician 
ports of Tyre and Sidon. 

Sidon surrendered to him ; Tyre resisted. 

Here, if anywhere, we have the evidence of great military 
ability on the part of Alexander. His army was his father's 
creation, but Philip had never shone in the siege of cities. 
When Alexander was a boy of sixteen, he had seen his father 
repulsed by the fortified city of Byzantium upon the Bosphorus. 
Now he was face to face with an inviolate city which had stood 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 



323 




S24 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

siege after siege, whick had resisted I^ebuchadnezzar the Great 
fcr fourteen years. For the standir.o; of sieges Semitic peoples 
hold the palm. Tyre "was then an island half a mile from the 
shore, and her fleet was unbeaten. On the other hand, Alex- 
ander had already learnt much by the siege of the citadel of 
Halicarnassus ; he had gathered to himself a corps of engineers 
from Cyprus and Phoenicia, the Sidonian fleet was with him, 
and presently the king of Cyprus came over to him with a 
hundred and twenty ships, which gave him the command of the 
sea. Moreover, great Carthage, either relying on the strength 
of the mother city or being disloyal to her, and being further- 
more entangled in a war in Sicily, sent no help. 

The first measure of Alexander was to build a pier from the 
mainland to the island, a dam which remains to this day ; and 
on this, as it came close to the walls of Tyre, he set up his 
towers and battering-rams. Against the walls he also moored 
ships in which towers and rams were erected. The Tyrians 
used fire-ships against this flotilla, and made sorties from their 
two harbours. In a big surprise raid that they made on the 
Cyprian ships they were caught and badly mauled; many of 
their ships were rammed, and one big galley of five banks of 
oars and one of four were captured outright. Finally a breach 
in the walls was made, and the Macedonians, clambering up the 
debris from their ships, stormed the city. 

The siege had lasted seven months. Gaza held out for two. 
In each case there was a massacre, the plundering of the city, 
and the selling of the survivors into slavery. Then towards the 
end of 332 b.c. Alexander entered Egypt, and the command 
•of the sea was assured. Greece, which all this while had been 
wavering in its policy, decided now at last that it was on the 
side of Alexander, and the council of the Greek states at Corinth 
voted its "captain-general" a golden crown of victory. From 
this time onward the Greeks were with the Macedonians. 

Tho Egyptians also were with the Macedonians. But they 
had been for Alexander from the beginning. They had lived 
under Persian rule fcr nearly two hundred years, and the com- 
ing of Alexander meant for them only a change of masters; 
on the whole, a change for the better. The country surrendered 
without a blow. Alexander treated its religious feelings with 
extreme respect. He unwrapped no mummies as Cambyses 
had done; he took no liberties with Apis, the sacred bull of 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 325 

Memphis. Here, in great temples and upon a vast scale, Alex- 
ander found tLe evidences of a religiosity, mysterious and ir- 
rational, to remind him of the secrets and mysteries that had 
entertained his mother and impressed his childhood. During 
his four months in Eg^'pt he flirted with religious emotions. 

He was still a very young man, we must remember, divided 
against himself. The strong sanity he inherited from his father 
had made him a great soldier; the teaching of Aristotle had 
given him something of the scientific outlook upon the world. 
He had destroyed Tyre ; in Egypt, at one of the mouths of the 
Nile, he now founded a new city, Alexandria, to replace that 
ancient centre of trade. To the north of Tyre, near Issus, he 
founded a second port, Alexandretta. Both of these cities 
flourish to this day, and for a time Alexandria was perhaps 
the greatest city in the world. The sites, therefore, must have 
been wisely chosen. But also Alexander had the unstable emo- 
tional imaginativeness of his mother, and side by side with 
such creative work he indulged in religious adventures. The 
gods of Egypt took possession of his mind. He travelled four 
hundred miles to the remote oasis of the oracle of Ammon. 
He wanted to settle certain doubts about his true parentage. 
His mother had inflamed his mind by hints and vague speeches 
cf seme deep mystery about his parentage. Was so ordinary a 
human being as Philip of Macedon really his rather? 

For nearly four hundred years Egypt had been a country 
politically contemptible, overrun now by Ethiopians, now by 
Assyrians, now by Babylonians, now by Persians. As the in- 
dignities of the present became more and more disagreeable to 
contemplate, the past and the other world became more splendid 
to Egyptian eyes. It is from the festering humiliations of peo- 
ples that arrogant religious propagandas spring. To the tri- 
umphant the downtrodden can say, ''It is naught in the sight 
of the true gods." So the son of Philip of Macedon, the master- 
general of Greece, was made to feel a small person amidst the 
gigantic temples. And he had an abnormal share of youth's 
normal ambition to impress everybody. How gratifying then 
for him to discover presently that he was no mere successful 
mortal, not one of these modern vulgar Greekish folk, but an- 
cient and divine, the son of a god, the Pharaoh god, son of 
Ammon Ra ! 



S26 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Already in a previous chapter we have given a description 
of that encounter in the desert temple. 

Not altogether was the young man convinced. He had his 
moments of conviction ; he had his saner phases when the thing 
was almost a jest. In the presence of Macedonians and Greeks 
he doubted if he was divine. When it thundered loudly, the 
ribald Aristarchus could ask him: "Won't ijcm. do something 
of the sort, oh Son of Zeus ?" But the crazy notion was, never- 
theless, present henceforth in his brain, ready to be inflamed 
by wine or flattery. 

!N'ext spring (331 b.c.) he returned to Tyre, and marched 
thence round towards Assyria, leaving the Syrian desert on his 
right. Near the ruins of forgotten Nineveh he found a great 
Persian army, that had been gathering since the battle of Issus, 
awaiting him. It was another huge medley of contingents, and 
it relied for its chief force upon that now antiquated weapon, 
the war chariot. Of these Darius had a force of two hundred, 
and each chariot had scythes attached to its wheels and to the 
pole and body of the chariot. There seem to have been four 
horses to each chariot, and it will be obvious that if one of those 
horses was wounded by javelin or arrow, that chariot was held 
up. The outer horses acted chiefly as buffers for the inner 
wheel horses ; they were hitched to the chariot by a single out- 
side trace which could be easily cut away, but the loss of one 
of the wheel horses completely incapacitated the whole affair. 
Against broken footmen or a crowd of individualist fighters 
such vehicles might be formidable ; but Darius began the battle 
by flinging them against the cavalry and light infantry. Few 
reached their objective, and those that did were readily disposed 
of. There was some manoeuvring for position. The well-drilled 
Macedonians moved obliquely across the Persian front, keeping 
good order ; the Persians, following this movement to the flank, 
opened gaps in their array. Then suddenly the disciplined 
Macedonian cavalry charged at one of these torn places and 
smote the centre of the Persian host. The infantry, followed 
close upon their charge. The centre and left of the Persians 
crumpled up. For a while the light cavalry on the Persian right 
gained ground against Alexander's left, only to be cut to pieces 
by the cavalry from Thessaly, which by this time had become 
almost as good as its Macedonian model. The Persian forces 
ceased to resemble an army. They dissolved into a vast multi- 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 327 

tilde of fugitives streaming- under great dust clouds and without 
a single rally across the hot plain towards Arbela. Through 
the dust and the flying crowd rode the victors, slaying and 
slaying until darkness stayed the slaughter. Darius led the 
retreat. 

Such was the battle of Arbela. It was fought on October 
the 1st, 331 B.C. We know its date so exactly, because it is 
recorded that, eleven days before it began, the soothsayers on 
both sides had been greatly exercised by an eclipse of the moon. 

Darius fled to the north into the country of the Medes. Alex- 
ander marched on to Babylon. The ancient city of Hammurabi 
(who had reigned seventeen hundred years before) and of 
Nebuchadnezzar the Great and of Nabonidus was still, unlike 
Nineveh, a prosperous and important centre. Like the Egyp- 
tians, the Babylonians were not greatly concerned at a change 
of rule to Macedonian from Persian. The temple of Bel- 
Marduk was in ruins, a quarry for building material, but the 
tradition of the Chaldean priests still lingered, and Alexander 
promised to restore the building. 

Thence he marched on to Susa, once the chief city of the van- 
ished and forgotten Elamites, and now the Persian capital. 

He went on to Persepolis, where, as the climax of a drunken 
carouse, he burnt down the great palace of the king of kings. 
This he afterwards declared was the revenge of Greece for the 
burning of Athens by Xerxes. 

§ 4 

And now begins a new phase in the story of Alexander, For 
the next seven years he wandered with an army chiefly of Mace- 
donians in the north and east of what was then the known world. 

At first it was a pursuit of Darius. Afterwards it became ? 

Was it a systematic survey of a world he meant to consolidate 
into one great order, or was it a wild-goose chase ? His own 
soldiers, his own intimates, thought the latter, and at last stayed 
his career beyond the Indus. On the map it looks very like a 
wild-goose chase; it seems to aim at nothing in particular and 
to get nowhere. 

The pursuit of Darius III soon came to a pitiful end. After 
the battle of Arbela his own generals seem to have revolted 
against his weakness and incompetence ; they made him a pris- 



328 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

oner, and took him with them in spite of his desire to throw 
himself upon the generosity of his conqueror. Bessus, the 
satrap of Bactria, they made their leader. There was at last a 
hot and exciting chase of the flying caravan which conveyed the 
captive king of kings. At dawn, after an all-night pursuit, it 
was sighted far ahead. The flight became a headlong bolt. 
Baggage, women, everything was abandoned by Bessus and 
his captains ; and one other impediment also they left behind. 
By the side of a pool of water far away from the road a Mace- 
donian trooper presently found a deserted mule-cart with its 
mules still in the traces. In this cart lay Darius, stabbed in a 
score of places and bleeding to death. He had refused to go on 
with Bessus, refused to mount the horse that was brought to 
him. So his captains had run him through with their spears and 
left him. . . . He asked his captors for water. What else he 
may have said we do not know. The historians have seen fit 
to fabricate a quite impossible last dying speech for him. Prob- 
ably he said very little. . . . 

When, a little after sunrise, Alexander came up, Darius was 
already dead. . . . 

To the historian of the world the wanderings of Alexander 
have an interest of their own quite apart from the light they 
throw upon his character. Just as the campaign of Darius I 
lifted the curtain behind Greece and Macedonia, and showed us 
something of the silent background to the north of the audible 
and recorded history of the early civilizations, so now Alex- 
ander's campaigns take us into regions about which there had 
hitherto been no trustworthy record made. 

We discover they were not desert regions, but full of a 
gathering life of their own. 

He marched to the shores of the Caspian, thence he travelled 
eastward across what is now called Western Turkestan. He 
founded a city that is now known as Herat ; whence he went 
northward by Cabul and by what is now Samarkand, right up 
into the mountains of Central Turkestan. He returned south- 
ward, and came down into India by the Khyber Pass. He 
fought a great battle on the Upper Indus against a very tall 
and chivalrous king, Porus, in which the Macedonian infantry 
encountered an array of elephants and defeated them. Possi- 
bly he would have pushed eastward across the deserts to the 
Ganges valley, but his troops refused to go further. Possibly, 



I 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 329 

had they not done so, then or later he would have .<2,one on until 
he vanished eastward out of history. But he was forced to turn 
about. He built a fleet and descended to the mouth of the Indus. 
There he divided his forces. The main army he took along 
the desolate coast back to the Persian Gulf, and on the way it 
suffered dreadfully and lost many men through thirst. The 
fleet followed him by sea, and rejoined him at the entrance to 
the Persian Gulf. In the course of this six-year tour he fought 
battles, received the submission of many strange peoples, and 
founded cities. He saw the dead body of Darius in June, 330 
B.C. ; he returned to Susa in 324 b.c. He found the empire in 
disorder: the provincial satraps raising armies of their own, 
Bactria and Media in insurrection, and Olympias making gov- 
ernment impossible in Macedonia. Harpalus, the royal treas- 
urer, had bolted with all that was portable of the royal treas- 
ure, and was making his way, bribing as he went, towards 
Greece. Some of the Harpalus money is said to have reached 
Demosthenes. 

But before we deal with the closing chapter of the story of 
Alexander, let us say a word or so about these northern regions 
into which he wandered. It is evident that from the Danube 
region right across South Kussia, right across the country to 
the north of the Caspian, right across the country to the east of 
the Caspian, as far as the mountain masses of the Pamir 
Plateau and eastward into the Tarim basin of Eastern Turkes- 
tan, there spread then a series of similar barbaric tribes and 
peoples all at about the same stage of culture, and for the most 
part Aryan in their language and possibly IS^ordic in their race. 
They had few cities, mostly they were nomadic; at times they 
settled temporarily to cultivate the land. They were certainly 
already mingling in Central Asia with Mongolian tribes, but 
the Mongolian tribes were not then prevalent there. 

An immense process of drying up and elevation has been 
going on in these parts of the world during the last ten thou- 
sand years. Ten thousand years ago there was probably a con- 
tinuous water barrier between the basin of the Obi and tlie 
Aral-Caspian sea. As this had dried up and the marshy land 
had become steppe-like country, Nordic nomads from the west 
and Mongolian nomads from the east had met and mixed, 
and the riding horse had come back into the western world. 
It is evident this great stretch of country was becoming a region 



330 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of accumulation for these barbaric peoples. They were very 
loosely attached to the lands they occupied. They lived in tents 
and wagons rather than houses. A brief cycle of plentiful and 
healthy years, or a cessation of tribal warfare under some strong 
ruler, would lead to considerable increases of population; then 
two or three hard years would suffice to send the tribes wander- 
ing again in search of food. 

From before the dawn of recorded history this region of 
human accumulation between the Danube and China had been, 
as it were, intennittently raining out tribes southward and 
westward. It was like a cloud bank behind the settled landscape 
that accumulated and then precipitated invaders. We have 
noted how the Keltic peoples drizzled westward, how the Ital- 
ians, the Greeks, and their Epirote, Macedonian, and Phrygian 
kindred came ' outh. We have noted, too, the Cimmerian drive 
from the east, like a sudden driving shower of barbarians across 
Asia Minor, the southward coming of the Scythians and Medes 
and Persians, and the Aryan descent into India. About a cen- 
tury before Alexander there had been a fresh Aryan invasion 
of Italy by a Keltic people, the Gauls, who had settled in the 
valley of the Po. Those various races came down out of their 
northern obscurity into the light of history; and meanwhile 
beyond that light the reser^^oir accumulated for fresh discharges. 
Alexander's march in Central Asia brings now into our history 
names that are fresh to us ; the Parthians, a race of mounted 
bowmen who were destined to play an important role in history 
a century or so later, and the Bactrians who lived in the sandy 
native land of the camel. Everywhere he seems to have met 
Aryan-speaking peoples. The Mongolian barbarians to the 
north-eastward were still unsuspected, no one imagined there 
was yet another great cloud bank of population be_yond the 
Scythians and their kind, in the north of China, that was pres- 
ently also to begin a drift westward and southward, mixing as it 
came with the Xordic Scythians and every other people of 
kindred habits that it encountered. As yet only China knew 
of the Huns ; there were no Turks in Western Turkestan or any- 
where else then, no Tartars in the world. 

This glimpse of the state of affairs in Turkestan in the fourth 
century b.c. is one of the most interesting aspects of the wan- 
derings of Alexander; another is his raid through the Punjab. 
From the point of view of the teller of the human story it is 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 331 

provocative that he did not go on into the Ganges country, and 
that consequently we have no independent accounts by Greek 
writers of the life in ancient Bengal. But there is a consider- 
able literature in various Indian languages dealing with Indian 
history and social life that still needs to be made accessible to 
European readers. 

§ 5 

Alexander had been in undisputed possession of the Persian 
empire for six years. He was now thirty-one. In those six 
years he had created very little. He had retained most of the 
organization of the Persian provinces, appointing fresh satraps 
or retaining the former ones ; the roads, the ports, the organiza- 
tion of the empire was still as Cyrus, his greater predecessor, 
had left them ; in Egypt he had merely replaced old provincial 
governors by new ones ; in India he had defeated Porus, and 
then left him in power much as he found him, except that Porus 
was now called a satrap by the Greeks. Alexander had, it is 
true, planned out a number of towns, and some of them were 
to grow into great towns ; seventeen Alexandrias he founded al- 
together; ^ but he had destroyed Tyre, and with Tyre the se- 
curity of the sea routes which had hitherto been the chief west- 
ward outlet for Mesopotamia. Historians say that he Ilellenized 
the east. But Babylonia and Egypt swarmed with Greeks 
before his time; he was not the cause, he was a part of the 
Hellenization. For a time the whole world, from the Adriatic 
to the Indus, was under one ruler ; so far he had realized the 
dreams of Isocrates and Philip his father. But how far was 
he making this a permanent and enduring union ? How far as 
yet w^as it anything more than a dazzling but transitory flourish 
of his own mag-nificent self ? 

He was making no great roads, setting up no sure sea com- 
munications. It is idle to accuse him of leaving education alone, 
because the idea that empires must be cemented by education 
was still foreign to human thought. But he was forming no 
group of statesmen about him ; he was thinking of no successor; 
he was creating no tradition — ^nothing more than a personal 
legend. The idea that the world would have to go on after 

' Mahaffy. Their names have undergone various changes — e.g., Candahar 
(Iskender) and Secunderabad. 



332 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Alexander, engaged in any other employment than the discus- 
sion of his magnificence, seems to have been outside his mental 
range. He was still young, it is true, but well before Philip 
was one and thirty he had been thinking of the education of 
Alexander. 

Was Alexander a statesman at all ? 

Some students of his career assure us that he was; that now 
at Susa he planned a mighty world empire, seeing it not simply 
as a Macedonian conquest of the world, but as a melting to- 
gether of racial traditions. He did one thing, at any rate, 
that gives colour to this idea ; he held a great marriage feast, 
in which he and ninety of his generals and friends were mar- 
ried to Persian brides. He himself married a daughter of 
Darius, though already he possessed an Asiatic wife in Roxana, 
the daughter of the king of Samarkand. This wholesale wed- 
ding was made a very splendid festival, and at the same time 
all of his Macedonian soldiers, to the number of several thou- 
sands, who had married Asiatic brides, were given wedding 
gifts. This has been called the Marriage of Europe and Asia ; 
the two continents were to be joined, wrote Plutarch, ''in lawful 
wedlock and by community of offspring." And next he began 
to train recruits from Persia and the north, Parthians, Bac- 
trians, and the like, in the distinctive disciplines of the phalanx 
and the cavalry. Was that also to assimilate Europe and Asia, 
or was it to make himself independent of his Macedonians 'i 
They thought the latter, at any rate, and mutinied, and it was 
with some difficulty that he brought them to a penitent mood 
and induced them to take part in a common feast with the Per- 
sians. The historians have made a long and eloquent speech 
for him on this occasion, but the gist of it was that he bade his 
Macedonians begone, and gave no sig-n of how he proposed they 
should get home out of Persia. After three days of dismay they 
submitted to him and begged his forgiveness. 

Here is the matter for a very pretty discussion. Was Alex- 
ander really planning a racial fusion or had he just fallen in 
love with the pomp and divinity of an Oriental monarch, and 
wished to get rid of these Europeans to whom he was only a 
king-leader ? The writers of his own time, and those who lived 
near to his time, lean very much to the latter alternative. They 
insist upon his immense vanity. They relate how he began 
to wear the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch. "At first 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 



333 



only before the barbarians and privately, but after^.ards he 
came to wear it in public when he sat for the dispatch of busi- 
ness." And presently he demanded Oriental prostrations from 
his friends. 

One thin^ seems to support the sue:gestion of ^reat personal 
vanity in Alexander. His portrait was painted and sculptured 
frequently, and always he is represented as a beautiful youth, 
with wonderful locks flowinsj backward from a broad forehead. 
Previously most men had worn beards. But Alexander, en- 
amoured of his own 
youthful loveliness, 
would not part with 
it; he remained a 
sham boy at thirty- 
two; he shaved his 
face, and so set a 
fashion in Greece 
and Italy that lasted 
many centuries. 

The stories of vio- 
lence and vanity in 
his closing years 
cluster thick upon his 
memory. He listened 
to tittle-tattle about 
Philotas, the son of 
Parmenio, one of his 
most trusted and 
fa ith f ul generals. 
Philotas, it was said, 
had boasted to some woman he was making love to that Alex- 
ander was a mere boy ; that, but for such men as his father and 
himself, there would have been no conquest of Persia, and the 
like. Such assertions had a certain element of truth in them 
The woman was brought to Alexander, who listened to her 
treacheries. Presently Philotas was accused of conspiracy, and, 
upon very insufficient evidence, tortured and executed. Then 
Alexander thought of Parmenio, whose other two sons had 
died for him in battle. He sent swift messengers to assas- 
sinate the old man before he could hear of his son's death! 
Now Parmenio had een one of the most trusted of Philip's 




Ulexazidcv the Qrcat^ 

(silver ami of hqsimachns , 521' 281 B.C.) 



334 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

generals ; it was Parmenio who had led the Macedonian armies 
into Asia before the murder of Philip. There can be little 
doubt of the substantial truth of this story, nor about the 
execution of Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle, who re- 
fused Alexander divine honours, and ''went about with as 
much pride as if he had demolished a tyranny, while the young 
men followed him as the only freeman among thousands." 
Mixed with such incidents we have the very illuminating story 
of the drunken quarrel in which he killed Clitus. The monarch 
and his company had been drinking hard, and the drink had 
made the talk loud and free. There was much flattery of the 
''young god," much detraction of Philip, at which Alexander 
had smiled with satisfaction.^ This drunken self-complacency 
was more than the Macedonians could stand; it roused Clitus, 
his foster-brother, to a frenzy. Clitus reproached Alexander 
with his Median costume and praised Philip, there was a loud 
quarrel, and, to end it, Clitus was hustled out of the room by 
his friends. He was, however, in the obstinate phase of drunk- 
enness, and he returned by another entrance. He was heard 
outside quoting Euripides "in a bold and disrespectful tone" : 

"Are these your customs? Is it thus that Greece 
Rewards her combatants? Shall one man claim 
The trophies won by thousands?" 

Whereupon Alexander snatched a spear from one of his 
guards and ran Clitus through the body as he lifted the curtain 
to come in. ... 

One is forced to believe that this was the real atmosphere of 
the young conqueror's life. Then the story of his frantic and 
cruel display of grief for Hephsestion can scarcely be all in- 
vention. If it is true, or in any part true, it displays a mind 
ill-balanced and altogether wrapped up in personal things, to 
whom empire was no more than opportunity for egoistic display, 
and all the resources of the world, stuff for freaks of that sort 
of "generosity" which robs a thousand people to extort the ad- 
miration of one astounded recipient. 

Hephsestion, being ill^ was put upon a strict diet, but in the 
absence of his physician at the theatre he ate a roasted fowl and 
drank a flagon of iced wine, in consequence of which he died. 
*D. G. Hogarth. 



CAREER OF ALEXAiNDER THE GREAT 



335 




336 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Thereupon Alexander decided upon a display of grief. It was 
the grief of a limatie. He had the physician crucified! He 
ordered every horse and mnle in Persia to be shorn, and pulled 
down the battlements of the neighbouring cities. He prohibited 
all music in his camp for a long time, and, having taken certain 
villages of the Cusseans, he caused all the adults to be massacred, 
as a sacrifice to the manes of Hepha?stion. Finally he set aside 
ten thousand talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. For those 
days this was an enormous sum of money. None of which 
things did any real honour to Hepha?stion, but they served to 
demonstrate to an awe-stricken 
world what a tremendous thing 
the sorrow of Alexander could be. 
This last story and many such 
stories may be lies or distortions or 
exaggerations. But they have a 
vein in common. After a bout of 
liard drinking in Babylon a sud- 
den fever came upon Alexander 
(323 B.C.), and he sickened and 
died. He was still only thirty- 
three years of age. Forthwith the 
world empire he had snatched at 
and held in his hands, as a child 
might snatch at and hold a precious 
vase, fell to the ground and was shattered to pieces. 

Whatever appearance of a worldwide order may have gleamed 
upon men's imaginations, vanished at his death. The story be- 
comes the story of a barbaric autocracy in confusion. Every- 
where the provincial rulers set up for themselves. In the course 
of a few years the entire family of Alexander had been de- 
stroyed. Roxana, his barbarian wife, was prompt to murder, 
as a rival, the daughter of Darius. She herself presently bore 
Alexander a posthumous son, who was also called Alexander. 
He was murdered, with her, a few years later (311 b.c). Her- 
cules, the only other son of Alexander, was murdered also. So, 
too, was Aridseus, the weak-minded half-brother (see § 2). 
Plutarch gives a last glimpse of Olympias during a brief in- 
terval of power in Macedonia, accusing first this person and 
then that of poisoning her wonderful son. Many she killed in 
her fury. The bodies of some of his circle who had died after 







CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 337 

his death she caused to be dug up, but we do not know if any 
fresh light was shed upon his death by these disinterments. 
Finally Olympias was killed in Macedonia by the friends of 
those she had slain. 

§ 6 

From this welter of crime there presently emerged three 
leading figures. Much of the old Persian empire, as far as 
the Indus eastward and almost to Lydia in the west, was held 
by one general Seleucus, who founded a dynasty, the Seleucid 
Dynasty ; Macedonia fell to another Macedonian general, Anti- 
gonus; a third ]\Iacedonian, Ptolemy, secured Egypt, and 
making Alexandria his chief city, established a sufficient naval 
ascendancy to keep also Cyprus and most of the coast of 
Phoenicia and Asia Minor. The Ptolemaic and Seleucid em- 
pires lasted for a considerable time ; the forms of government in 
Asia Minor and the Balkans were more unstable. Two maps 
will help the reader to a sense of the kaleidoscopic nature of 
the political boundaries of the third century b.c. Antigonus 
was defeated and killed at the battle of Ipsus (301), leaving 
Lysimachus, the governor of Thrace, and Cassander, of Mace- 
donia and Greece, as equally transitory successors. Minor gov- 
ernors carved out smaller states. Meanwhile the barbarians 
swung down into the broken-up and enfeebled world of civiliza- 
tion from the west and from the east. From the west came the 
Gauls, a people closely related to the Kelts. They raided down 
through Macedonia and Greece to Delphi, and (227 b.c.) two 
sections of them crossed the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, being 
first employed as mercenaries and then setting up for them- 
selves as independent plunderers ; and after raiding almost to 
the Taurus, they settled in the old Phrygian land, holding the 
people about them to tribute. (These Gauls of Phrygia be- 
came the Galatians of St. Paul's Epistle.) Armenia and the 
southern shores of the Black Sea became a confusion of chang- 
ing rulers. Kings with Hellenistic ideas appeared in Cappa- 
docia, in Pontus (the south shore of the Black Sea), in Bithynia, 
and in Pergamum. From the east the Scythians and the 
Parthians and Bactrians also drove southward. . . . For a time 
there were Greek-ruled Bactrian states becoming more and more 
Orientalized; in the second century b.c. Greek adventurers from 



338 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Bactria raided down into North India and founded short-lived 
kingdoms there, the last eastward lling- of the Greek; then 
gradually barbarism fell again like a curtain between the West- 
ern civilizations and India. 



Amidst all these shattered fragments of the burst bubble of 
Hellenic empire one small state stands out and demands at 
least a brief section to itself, the kingdom of Pergamum. We 
hear first of this town as an independent centre during the 
struggle that ended in the battle of Ipsus. While the tide of 
the Gaulish invasion swirled and foamed to and fro about Asia 
Minor between the years 277 and 241, Pergamum for a time 
paid them tribute, but she retained her gMieral independence, 
and at last, under Attains I, refused her tribute and defeated 
them in two decisive battles. For more than a centui*y there- 
after (until 133 B.C.) Pergamum remained free, and was per- 
haps during that period the most highly civilized state in the 
world. On the hill of the Acropolis was reared a rich group of 
buildings, palaces, temples, a museum, and a library, rivals of 
those of Alexandria of which we shall presently tell, and almost 
the first in the world. Under the princes of Pergamum, Greek 
art blossomed afresh, and the reliefs of the altar of the temple 
of Zeus and the statues of the fighting and dying Gauls which 
were made there, are among the great artistic treasures of 
mankind. 

In a little while, as we shall tell later, the influence of a 
new power began to be felt in the Easteni Mediterranean, tbe 
power of the Roman republic, friendly to Greece and to Greek 
civilization; and in this power the Hellenic communities of 
Pergamum and Rhodes found a natural and useful ally and 
supporter against the Galatians and against the Orientalized 
Seleucid empire. We shall relate how at last the Roman power 
came into Asia, how it defeated the Seleucid empire at the 
battle of Magnesia (190 e.g.), and drove it out of Asia Minor 
and beyond the Taurus mountains, and how finally in 133 e.g. 
Attains III, the last king of Pergamum, bowing to his sense of 
an inevitable destiny, made the Roman republic the heir to 
his kingdom, which became then the Roman province of "Asia." 



•* 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 



339 




r 



340 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Nearly all historians are disposed to regard the career of 
Alexander the Great as marking an epoch in human aii'airs. 
It drew together all the known world, excepting only the west- 
em Mediterranean, into one drama. But the opinions men 
have formed of Alexander himself vary enoraiously. They 
fall, most of them, into two main schools. One type of scholar 
is fascinated by the youth and splendour of this young man. 
These Alexander-worshippers seem disposed to take him at his 
own valuation, to condone every crime and folly either as the 
mere ebullience of a rich nature or as the bitter necessity to 
some gigantic scheme, and to regard his life as framed i^pon a 
design, a scheme of statesmanship, such as all the wider knowl- 
edge and wider ideas of these later times barely suffice to bring 
into the scope of our understanding. On the other hand, there 
are those m4io see him only as a wrecker of the slowly maturing 
possibilities of a free and tranquil Hellenized world. 

Before we ascribe to Alexander or to his father Philip 
schemes of world policy such as a twentieth-century historian- 
philosopher might approve, we shall do well to consider very 
carefully the utmost range of knowledge and thought that was 
possible in those days. The world of Plato, Isocrates, and 
Aristotle had practically no historical perspective at all ; there 
had not been such a thing as history in the world, history, that 
is, as distinguished from mere priestly chronicles, until the last 
couple of centuries. Even highly educated men had the most 
circumscribed ideas of geogTaphy and foreign countries. For 
most men the world was still flat and limitless. The only sys- 
tematic political philosophy was based on the experiences of 
minute city states, and took no thought of empires. Nobody 
knew anything of the origins of civilization. No one had specu- 
lated upon economics before that time. No one had worked 
out the reaction of one social class upon another. We are too 
apt to consider the career of Alexander as the crown of some 
process that had long been afoot; as the climax of a crescendo. 
In a sense, no doubt, it was that; but much more true is it 
that it was not so much an end as a b(sginning ; it was the first 
revelation to the human imagination of the oneness of human 
affairs. The utmost reach of the thought of Greece before his 
time was of a Persian empire Hellenized, a predominance in 



CAREER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT S4I 

the world of Macedonians and Greeks. But before Alexander 
was dead, and much more after he was dead and there had 
been time to think him over, the conception of a world law 
and organization was a practicable and assimilable idea for 
the minds of men. 

For some generations Alexander the Great was for mankind 
the symbol and embodiment of world order and world dominion. 
He became a fabulous being. His head, adorned with the 
divine symbols of the demi-god Hercules or the god Ammon 
Ra, appears on the coins of such among his successors as could 
claim to be his heirs. Then the idea of world dominion was 
taken up by another great people, a people who for some cen- 
turies exhibited considerable political genius, the Romans ; and 
the figure of another conspicuous adventurer, Csesar, eclipsed 
for the western half of the old world the figure of Alexander. 

So by the beginning of the third century b.c. we find already 
arisen in the Western civilization of the old world three of the 
great structural ideas that rule the mind of contemporary man- 
kind. We have already traced the escape of writing and knowl- 
edge from the secrets and mysteries and initiations of the old- 
world priesthoods, and the development of the idea of a uni- 
versal knowledge, of a universally understandable and com- 
municable history and philosophy. We have taken the figures 
of Herodotus and Aristotle as typical exponents of this first 
great idea, the idea of science — using the word science in its 
widest and properest sense, to include history and signify a 
clear vision of man in relation to the things about him. We 
have traced also the generalization of religion among the Baby- 
lonians, Jews, and other Semitic peoples, from the dark worship 
in temples and consecrated places of some local or tribal god 
to the open service of 07ie universal God of Righteousness, 
whose temple is the whole world. And now we have traced 
also the first germination of the idea of a world polity. The 
rest of the history of mankind is very largely the history oi 
those three ideas of science, of a universal righteousness, and 
of a human commonweal, spreading out from the minds of the 
rare and exceptional persons and peoples in which they first 
originated, into the general consciousness of the race, and giving 
first a new colour, then a new spirit, and then a new direction 
to human affairs. 



XXIV 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 

1. The Science of Alexandria. § 2. Philosophy of Alexan- 
dria. § 3. Alexandria as a. Factory of Religions. 



ONE of the most prosperous fragments of the brief world 
empire of Alexander the Great was Egypt, which fell 
to the share of the Ptolemy whose name we have al- 
ready noted as one of the associates of Alexander whom King 
Philip had banished. The country was at a secure distance 
from plundering Gaul or Parthian, and the destruction of Tyre 
and the Phoenician navy, and the creation of Alexandria gave 
Egypt a temporary naval ascendancy in the Eastern Mediter- 
ranean. Alexandria grew to proportions that rivalled Car- 
thage ; eastward she had an overseas trade through the Red Sea 
with Arabia and India ; and westward her traffic competed with 
the Carthaginian. In the Macedonian and Greek governors of 
the Ptolemies, the Egyptians found a government more sympa- 
thetic and tolerable than any they had ever known since they 
ceased to be a self-governing empire. Indeed it is rather that 
Egypt conquered and annexed the Ptolemies politically, than 
that the Macedonians ruled Egypt. 

There was a return to Egyptian political ideas, rather than 
any attempt to Hellenize the government of the country. 
Ptolemy became Pharaoh, the god-king, and his administration 
continued the ancient tradition of Pepi, Thotmes, Rameses, 
and Necho. Alexandria, however, for her town affairs, and 
subject to the divine overlordship of Pharaoh, had a constitu- 
tion of the Greek city type. And the language of the court and 
administration was Attic Greek. Greek became so much the 
general language of educated people in Egypt that the Jewish 
community there found it necessary to translate their Bible into 
the Greek language, many men of their own people being no 

342 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 343 

longer able to understand Hebrew. Attic Greek for some cen- 
turies before and after Christ was the language of all educated 
men from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. 

Of all Alexander's group of young men, Ptolemy seems to 
have done most to carry out those ideas of a systematic organi- 
zation of knowledge with which Aristotle had no doubt 
familiarized the court of Philip of Macedon. Ptolemy was a 
man of very extraordinary intellectual gifts, at once creative 
and modest, with a certain understandable cynicism towards 
the strain of Olympias in the mind of Alexander. His contem- 
porary history of Alexander's campaigns has perished; but it 
was a source to which all the surviving accounts are deepl}' 
indebted. 

The Museum he set up in Alexandria was in effect the first 
university in the world. As its name implies, it was dedicated 
to the service of the Muses, which was also the case with the 
Peripatetic school at Athens. It was, however, a religious body 
only in form, in order to meet the legal difficulties of endow- 
ment in a world that had never foreseen such a thing as a 
secular intellectual process. It was essentially a college of 
learned men engaged chiefly in research and record, but also 
to a certain extent in teaching. At the outset, and for two or 
three generations, the Museum at Alexandria presented such a 
scientific constellation as even Athens at its best could not rival. 
Particularly sound and good was the mathematical and geo- 
graphical work. The names of Euclid, familiar to every school- 
boy, Eratosthenes, who measured the size of the earth and came 
within fifty miles of the true diameter, Apollonius, who wrote 
on conic sections, stand out. Hipparchus made the first attempt 
to catalogue and map the stars with a view to checking any 
changes that might be occurring in the heavens. Hero devised 
the first steam engine. Archimedes came to Alexandria to 
study, and remained a frequent correspondent of the Museum. 
The medical school of Alexandria was equally famous. For 
the first time in the world's history a standard of professional 
knowledge was set up. Herophilus, the greatest of the Alexan- 
drian anatomists, is said to have conducted vivisections upon 
condemned criminals. Other teachers, in opposition to Hero- 
philus, condemned the study of anatomy and developed the sci- 
ence of drugs. But this scientific blaze at Alexandria did not 
endure altogether for more than a century. The organization 



344 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



of the Museum was not planned to ensure its mental continuity. 
It was a "royal" college; its professors and fellows (as we may 
call them) were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. "The repub- 
lican character of the 
private corporations 
called the schools or 
academies at Athens 
was far more stable 
and independent." 
Eoyal patronage was 
all very well so long 
as Pharaoh was Ptol- 
emy I, or Ptolemy 
II, but the strain de- 
generated, and the 
long tradition o f 
Egyptian priestcraft 
presently swallowed 
up the Ptolemies — 
and destroyed the 
Aristotelian mental- 
ity of the Museum 
altogether. The 
Museum had not ex- 
isted for a hundred 
years before its sci- 
entific energy was 
extinct. 

Side by side with 
the Museum, Ptol- 
emy I created a more 
enduring monument 
to himself in the 
great library. This 
was a combination of 
state library and 
state publishing upon 
a scale hitherto unheard of. It was to be altogether encyclopae- 
dic. If any stranger brought an unknown book to Egypt, he 
had to have it copied for the collection, and a considerable staff 
of copyists was engaged continually in making duplicates of all 




SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 345 

the more popular and necessary works. The library, like a 
university press, had an outward trade. It was a book-selling 
affair. Under Callimachus, the head of the library during the 
time of Ptolemy II and III, the arrangement and cataloguing 
of the accumulations was systematically undertaken. In those 
days, it must be remembered, bocks were not in pages, but rolled 
like the music-rolls of the modern piano-player, and in order 
to refer to any particular passage, a reader had to roll back 
or roll forward very tediously, a process which wore out books 
and readers together. One thinks at once of a simple and 
obvious little machine by which such a roll could have been 
quickly wound to and fro for reference, but nothing of the sort 
seems to have been used. Every time a roll was read it was 
handled by two perspiring hands. It was to minimize the waste 
of time and trouble that Callimachus broke up long works, such 
as the History of Herodotus, into "books" or volumes, as we 
should call them, each upon a separate roll. The library of 
Alexandria drew a far vaster crowd of students than the teachers 
of the Museum. The lodging and catering for these visitors 
from all parts of the world became a considerable business 
interest for the Alexandrian population. 

It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the in- 
tellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities 
of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is 
now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of 
the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the 
enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that 
went on through all the centuries during which that library flour- 
ished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and 
there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any 
one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a 
quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious 
unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two 
encyclopaedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biograph- 
ical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no 
marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too 
much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 
300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar 
and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in 
manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very 
accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read 



346 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recor- 
rected. The Alexandrian author had to dictate or reeopy every 
word he wrote. Before he could turn back to what he had 
written previously, he had to dry his last words by waving them 
in the air or pouring sand over them ; he had not even blotting- 




paper. Whatever an author wrote had to be recopied again 
and again before it could reach any considerable circle of 
readers, and every copyist introduced some new error. When- 
ever a need for maps or diagrams arose, there were fresh diffi- 
culties. Such a science as anatomy, for example, depending as 
it does upon accurate drawing, must have been enormously 
hampered by the natural limitations of the copyist. The trans- 
mission of geographical fact again must have been almost in- 
credibly tedious. No doubt a day will come when a private 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 347 

library and writing-desk of the year a.d. 1919 will seem quaintly 
clumsy and difficult ; but, measured by the standards of. Alex- 
andria, they are astonishingly quick, efficient, and economical 
of nervous and mental energy. 

No attempt seems to have been made at Alexandria to print 
anything at all. That strikes one at first as a very remarkable 
fact. The world was crying out for books, and not simply for 
books. There was an urgent public need for notices, proclama- 
tions, and the like. Yet there is nothing in the history of 
the Western civilizations that one can call printing until tbe 
fifteenth century a.d. It is not as though printing was a 
recondite art or dependent upon any precedent and preliminary 
discoveries. Printing is the most obvious of dodges. In prin- 
ciple it has always been known. As we have already stated, 
there is ground for supposing that the PalaBolithic men of the 
Magdalenian period may have printed designs on their leather 
garments. The "seals" of ancient Sumeria again were printing 
devices. Coins are print. Illiterate persons in all ages have 
used wooden or metal stamps for their signatures; William I, 
the ISTorman Conqueror of England, for example, used such a 
stamp with ink to sign documents. In China the classics were 
being printed by the second century a.d. Yet either because of 
a complex of small difficulties about ink or papyrus or the form 
of books, or because of some protective resistance on the part 
of the owners of the slave copyists, or because the script was 
too swift and easy to set men thinking how to write it still more 
easily, as the Chinese character or the Gothic letters did, or 
because of a gap in the social system between men of thought 
and knowledge and men of technical skill, printing was not used 
— not even used for the exact reproduction of illustrations. 

The chief reason for this failure to develop printing sys- 
tematically lies, no doubt, in the fact that there was no abundant 
supply of printable material of a uniform texture and con- 
venient form. The supply of papyrus was strictly limited, 
strip had to be fastened to strip, and there was no standard size 
of sheet. Paper had yet to come from China to release the 
mind of Europe. Had there been presses, they would have 
had to stand idle while the papyrus rolls were slowly made. 
But this explanation does not account for the failure to use 
block printing in the case of illustrations and diagrams. 

These limitations enable us to understand why it was that 



348 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Alexandria could at once achieve the most extraordinary intel- 
lectual triumphs — for such a feat as that of Eratosthenes, for 
instance, having regard to his poverty of apparatus, is suffi- 
cient to put him on a level with Newton or Pasteur — and yet 
have little or no effect upon the course of politics or the lives 
and thoughts of people round about her. Her JMuseum and 
library were a centre of light, but it was light in a dark lantern 
hidden from the general world. There were no means of carry- 
ing its results even to sympathetic men abroad except by tedious 
letter-writing. There was no possibility of communicating what 
was known there to the general body of men. Students had to 
come at great cost to themselves to this crowded centre because 
there was no other way of gathering even scraps of knowledge. 
At Athens and Alexandria there were bookstalls where manu- 
script note-books of variable quality could be bought at reason- 
able prices, but any extension of education to larger classes and 
other centres would have produced at once a restrictive shortage 
of papyrus. Education did not reach into the masses at all; 
to become more than superficially educated one had to abandon 
the ordinary life of the times and come for long years to live a 
hovering existence in the neighbourhood of ill-equipped and 
overworked sages. Learning was not indeed so complete a 
withdrawal from ordinary life as initiation into a priesthood, 
but it was still something in that nature. 

And very speedily that feeling of freedom, that openness and 
directness of statement which is the vital air of the true intel- 
lectual life, faded out of Alexandria. From the first the patron- 
age even of Ptolemy I set a limit to political discussion. Pres- 
ently the dissensions of the schools let in the superstitions and 
prejudices of the city mob to scholastic affairs. 

Wisdom passed away from Alexandria and left pedantry be- 
hind. For the use of books was substituted the worship of 
books. Very speedily the learned became a specialized queer 
class with unpleasant characteristics of its own. The Museum 
had not existed for half a dozen generations before Alexandria 
was familiar with a new type of human being; shy, eccentric, 
unpractical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierce upon trivi- 
alities of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague 
within as of the unlearned without, the bent Scholarly Man. 
He was as intolerant as a priest, though he had no altar; as 
obscurantist as a magician, though he had no cave. For him 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 349 

no method of copying was sufficiently tedious and no rare book 
sufficiently inaccessilDle. He was a sort of by-product of the 
intellectual process of mankind. For many precious genera- 
tions the new-lit fires of the human intelligence were to be seri- 
ously banked down by this by-product. 

Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only 
science and history of full value to men consist of what is gen- 
erally and clearly known ; this is surely a platitude, but we have 
still to discover how to preserve our centres of philosophy and 
research from the caking and darkening accumulations of nar- 
row and dingy-spirited specialists. We have still to ensure that 
a man of learning shall be none the less a man of affairs, and 
that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly, honestly, 
and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are 
the , substance of mankind. 



At first the mental activities of Alexandria centred upon 
the Museum, and were mainly scientific. Philosophy, which in 
a more vigorous age had been a doctrine of power over self and 
the material world, without abandoning these pretensions, be- 
came in reality a doctrine of secret consolation. The stimulant 
changed into an opiate. The philosopher let the world, as the 
vulgar say, i-tp, the world of which he was a part, and consoled 
himself by saying in very beau tiful and elaborate forms that the 
world was illusion and tliat there was in him something quintes- 
sential and sublime, outside and above the world. Athens, 
politically insignificant, but still a great and crowded mart 
throughout the fourth century, decaying almost imperceptibly 
so far as outer seeming went, and treated with a strange respect 
that was half contempt by all the warring powers and adven- 
turers of the world, was the fitting centre of such philosophical 
teaching. It was quite a couple of centuries before the schools 
of Alexandria became as important in philosophical discussion. 



If Alexandria was late to develop a distinctive philosophy, 
she was early prominent as a great factory and exchange of 
religious ideas. 



350 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The Museum and Library represented only one of the three 
sides of the triple city of Alexandria. They represented the 
Aristotelian, the Hellenic, and Macedonian element. But 
Ptolemy I had brought together two other factors to this strange 
centre. First there was a great number of Jews, brought partly 
from Palestine, but largely also from those settlements in Egypt 
which had never returned to Jerusalem ; these latter were the 
Jews of the Diaspora or Dispersion, a race of Jews who, as we 
have already noted in Chapter XIX, had not shared the Baby- 
lonian Captivity, but who were nevertheless in possession of the 
Bible and in close correspondence with their co-religionists 
throughout the world. These Jews populated so great a quarter 
of Alexandria that the town became the largest Jewish city 
in the world, with far more Jews in it than there were in 
Jerusalem. We have already noted that they had found 
it necessary to translate their scriptures into Greek. And, 
finally, there was a great population of native Egyptians, also 
for the most part speaking Greek, but with the superstitious 
temperament of the dark whites and with the vast tradition of 
forty centuries of temple religion and temple sacrifices at the 
back of their minds. In Alexandria three types of mind and 
spirit met, the three main types of the white race, the clear- 
headed criticism of the Aryan Greek, the moral fervour and 
monotheism of the Semitic Jew, and the deep Mediterranean 
tradition of mysteries and sacrifices that we have already seen 
at work in the secret cults and occult practices of Greece, ideas 
which in Hamitic Egypt ruled proudly in great temples in the 
open light of day. 

These three were the penuanent elements of the Alexandrian 
blend. But in the seaport and markets mingled men of every 
known race, comparing their religious ideas and customs. It 
is even related that in the third century b.c. Buddhist mis- 
sionaries came from the court of King Asoka in India. Aris- 
totle remarks in his Politics that the religious beliefs of men 
are apt to borrow their form from political institutions, ''men 
assimilate the lives no less than the bodily forms of the gods 
to their own," and this age of Greek-speaking great empires 
under autocratic monarchs was bearing hardly upon those merely 
local celebrities, the old tribal and city deities. Men were 
requiring deities with an outlook at least as wide as the em- 
pires, and except where the interests of powerful priesthoods 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 35] 



tsiS 'and 

Horus 



stood in the way, a curious process of assimilation of ^ods was 
going on. Men found that though there were many gods, they 
were all very much alike. Where there had been many gods, 
men came to think there must be really only one god under a 
diversity of names. He had been everywhere — under an alias. 
The Roman Jupiter, the Greek Zeus, the Egyptian Ammon, the 
putative father of Alexander and the old antagonist of Ameno- 
phis IV the Babylonian Bel-Marduk, were all sufficiently sim- 
ilar to be identified. 

"Father of all in every age, in every clime adored 
By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove 
or Lord." 

Where there were distinct differences, the difficulty was met 
by saying that these were different aspects of the same god. 
Bel-Marduk, however, was now a very decadent god indeed, 
who hardly survived as a pseudonym; 
Assur, Dagon, and the like, poor old gods 
of fallen nations, had long since passed 
out of memory, and did not come into the 
amalgamation. Osiris, a god popular 
with the Egyptian commonalty, was al- 
ready identified with Apis, the sacred 
bull in the temple of Memphis, and some- 
what confused with Ammon. Under the 
name of Serapis he became the great 
god of Hellenic Alexandria. He was 
Jupiter-Serapis. The Egyptian cow 
goddess, Hathor or Isis, was also repre- 
sented now in human guise as the wife 
of Osiris, to whom she bore the infant 
Horus, who grew up to be Osiris again. 
These bald statements sound strange, 
no doubt, to a modern mind, but these 
identifications and mixing up of one god 
with another are very illustrative of the 
struggle the quickening human intelligence was making to cling 
still to religion and its emotional bonds and fellowship, while 
making its gods more reasonable and universal. 

This fusing of one god with another is called theocrasia, and 
nowhere was it more vigorously going on than in Alexandria. 




352 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Only two peoples resisted it in this period : the Jews, who al- 
ready had their faith in the One God of Heaven and Earth, 
Jehovah, and the Persian" who had a monotheistic sun worship. 
_ It was Ptolemy I who set up 

not only the Museum in Alex- 
andria, but the Serapeum, de- 
voted to the worship of a trinity 
of god which represented the re- 
sult of a process of theocrasia ap- 
plied more particularly to the 
gods of Greece and Egypt. 

This trinity consisted of the 
god Serapis (= Osiris + Apis), 
the goddess Isis (= Hathor, the 
cow-moon goddess), and the child- 
gcd Horus. In one way or an- 
other almost every other god was 
identified with one or other of 
these three aspects of the one 
God, even the sun god Mithras of 
the Persians. And they were 
each other ; they were three, but 
they were also one. They were 
worshipped with great fervour, 
and the jangling of a peculiar in- 
strument, the sistrum, a frame set with bells and used rather 
after the fashion of the tambourine in the proceedings of the 
modern Salvation Army, was a distinctive accessory to the cere- 
monies. And now for the first time we find the idea of immor- 
tality becoming the central idea of a religion that extended be- 
yond Egypt. ^Neither the early Aryans nor the early Semites 
seem to have troubled very much about immortality, it has af- 
fected the Mongolian mind very little, but the continuation of 
the individual life after death had been from the earliest times 
an intense preccupation of the Egyptians. It played now a 
large part in the worship of Serapis. In the devotional litera- 
ture of his cult he is spoken of as "the saviour and leader of 
souls, leading souls to the light and receiving them again." It 
is stated that "he raises the dead, he shows forth the longed-for 
"\ight of the sun to those who see, whose holy tombs contain multi- 
tudes of sacred books" ; and again, "we never can escape him. 




Scvi 



'apw 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION AT ALEXANDRIA 353 

he will save us, after death we shall still be the care of his 
providence." ^ 

The ceremonial biirnini^ of candles and the offerins: of ex- 
votos, that is to say of small models of parts of the hnman body 
in need of succour, was a part of the worship of the Serapeum. 
Isis attracted many devotees, who vowed their lives to her. 
Her images stood in the temple, crowned as the Queen of 
Heaven and bearing the infant Horus in her arms. The candles 
flared and guttered before her, and the wax ex-votos hung about 
the shrine. The novice was put through a long and careful prep- 
aration, he took vows of celibacy, and when he was initiated his 
head was shaved and he was clad in a linen garment. . . . 

In this worship of Serapis, which spread very widely through- 
out the civilized world in the third and second centuries e.g., 
we see the most remarkable anticipations of usages and forms 
of expression that were destined to dominate the European 
world throughout the Christian era. The essential idea, the 
living spirit, of Christianity was, as we shall presently show, 
a new thing in the history of the mind and will of man ; but 
the garments of ritual and symbol and formula that Christianity 
has worn, and still in many countries wears to this day, were 
certainly woven in the cult and temples of Jupiter, Serapis, and 
Isis that spread now from Alexandria throughout the civilized 
world in the age of theocrasia in the second and first centuries 
before Christ. 

^Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity. 



XXV 

THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 

1. The Story of Gautama. § 2. Teaching and Legend in 
Conflict. § 3. The Gospel of Gautama Buddha. § 4. Bud- 
dhism, and Asol^a.^ § 5. Tivo Great Chinese Teachers. § 6. 
The Corruptions of Buddhism. § 7. The Present Range of 
Buddhism. 



IT is interesting to turn from the mental and moral activities 
of Athens and Alexandria, and the growth of hnman ideas 
in the Mediterranean world, to the almost entirely separate 
intellectual life of India. Here was a civilization which from 
the first seems to have grown up upon its own roots and with a 
character of its own. It was cut off from the civilizations to 
the west and to the east by vast mountain barriers and desert 
regions. The Aryan tribes who had come down into the penin- 
sula soon lost touch with their kindred to the west and north, 
and developed upon lines of their own. This was more particu- 
larly the case with those who had passed on into the Ganges 
country and beyond. They found a civilization already scat- 
tered over India, the Dravidian civilization. This had arisen 
independently, just as the Sumerian, Cretan, and Egyptian 
civilizations seem to have arisen, out of that widespread de- 
velopment of the neolithic culture, the heliolithic culture, whose 
characteristics we have already described. They revived and 
changed this Dravidian civilization much as the Greeks did the 
^Egean or the Semites the Sumerian. 

These Indian Aryans were living under different conditions 
from those that prevailed to the north-west. They were living 
in a warmer climate, in which a diet of beef and fermented 
liquor was destructive; they were forced, therefore, to a gen- 
erally vegetarian dietary, and the prolific soil, almost unasked, 
gave them all the food they needed. There was no further 
^ Pronounced Ashoka. 
354 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 355 

reason for them to wander ; the crops and seasons were trust- 
worthy. They wanted little clothing or housing. They wanted 
so little that trade was undeveloped. There was still land for 
every one who desired to cultivate a patch — and a little patch 
sufficed. Their political life was simple and comparatively 
secure ; no great conquering powers had arisen as yet in India, 
and her natural barriers sufficed to stop the early imperialisms 
to the west of her and to the east. Thousands of comparatively 
pacific little village republics and chieftainships were spread 
over the land. There was no sea life, there were no pirate 
raiders, no strange traders. One might write a history of India 
coming down to four hundred years ago and hardly mention 
the sea. 

The history of India for many centuries had been happier, 
less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. The 
noblemen, the rajahs, hunted; life was largely made up of love 
stories. Here and there a maharajah arose amidst the rajahs 
and built a city, caught and tamed many elephants, slew many 
tigers, and left a tradition of his splendour and his wonderful 
processions. 

It was somewhen between 500 and 600 b.c, when Croesus 
was flourishing in Lydia and Cyrus was preparing to snatch 
Babylon from Nabonidus, that the founder of Buddhism was 
born in India. He was born in a small republican tribal com- 
munity in the north of Bengal under the Himalayas, in what is 
now overgrown jungle country on the borders of Nepal. The 
little state was ruled by a family, the Sakya clan, of which 
this man, Siddhattha Gautama, was a member. Siddhattha 
was his personal name, like Caius or John; Gautama, or 
Gotama, his family name, like Csesar or Smith; Sakya his clan 
name, like Julius. The institution of caste was not yet fully 
established in India, and the Brahmins, though they were privi- 
leged and influential, had not yet struggled to the head of the 
system; but there were already strongly marked class distinc- 
tions and a practically impermeable partition between the noble 
Aryans and the darker common people. Gautama belonged to 
the former race. His teaching, we may note, was called the 
Aryan Path, the Aryan Truth, 

It is only within the last half-century that the increasing 
study of the Pali language, in which most of the original sources 
were written, has given the world a real knowledge of the life 



356 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and actual thought of Gautama. Previously his story was over- 
laid by monstrous accumulations of legend, and his teaching 
violently misconceived. But now we have a very human and 
understandable account of him. 

He was a good-looking, capable young man of fortune, and 
until he was twenty-nine he lived the ordinary aristocratic life 
of his time. It was not a very satisfying life intellectually. 
There was no literature except the oral tradition of the Vedas, 
and that was chiefly monopolized by the Brahmins; there was 
even less knowledge. The world was bound by the snowy 
Himalayas to the north and spread indefinitely to the south. 
The city of Benares, which had a king, was about a hundred 
miles away. The chief amusements were hunting and love- 
making. All the good that life seemed to offer, Gautama en- 
joyed. He was married at nineteen to a beautiful cousin. For 
some years they remained childless. He hunted and played and 
went about in his sunny world of gardens and groves and 
irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this life that a great 
discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine 
brain that seeks employment. He lived amidst plenty and 
beauty, he passed from gratification to gratification, and his soul 
was not satisfied. It was as if he heard the destinies of the 
race calling to him. He felt that the existence he was leading 
was not the reality of life, but a holiday — a holiday that had 
gone on too long. 

While he was in this mood he saw four things that served to 
point his thoughts. He was driving on some excursion of 
pleasure, when he came upon a man dreadfully broken down 
by age. The poor bent, enfeebled creature struck his imagina- 
tion. ''Such is the way of life," said Channa, his charioteer, 
and "to that we must all come." While this was yet in his mind 
he chanced upon a man suffering horribly from some loathsome 
disease. "Such is the way of life," said Channa. The third 
vision was of an unburied body, swollen, eyeless, mauled by 
passing birds and beasts and altogether terrible. "That is the 
way of life," said Channa. 

The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the 
unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of 
Gautama. And then he and Channa saw one of those wander- 
ing ascetics who already existed in great numbers in India. 
These men lived under severe rules, spending much time in 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 357 

meditation and in religious discussion. For many men before 
Gautama in that land of uneventful sunshine had foimd life 
distressing and mysterious. These ascetics were all supposed 
to be seeking some deeper reality in life, and a passionate desire 
to do likewise took possession of Gautama. 

He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when 
the news was brought to him that his wife had been delivered 
of his first-born son. "This is another tie to break," said 
Gautama. 

He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fel- 
low clansmen. There was a great feast and a Nautch dance 
to celebrate the birth of this new tie, and in the night Gautama 
awoke in a great agony of spirit, "like a man who is told that 
his house is on fire." In the ante-room the dancing girls were 
lying in strips of darkness and moonlight. He called Channa, 
and told him to prepare his horse. Then he went softly to the 
threshold of his wife's chamber, and saw her by the light of a 
little oil lamp, sleeping sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with 
his infant son in her arm. He felt a great craving to take up 
the child in one first and last embrace before he departed, but 
the fear of waking his wife prevented him, and at last he 
turned away and went out into the bright Indian moonshine to 
Channa waiting with the horses, and mounted and stole away. 

As he rode through the night with Channa, it seemed to him 
that Mara, the Tempter of ]\Iankind, filled the sky and disputed 
with him. "Return," said Mara, "and be a king, and I will 
make you the greatest of kings. Go on, and you will fail. 
Never will I cease to dog your footsteps. Lust or malice or 
anger will betray you at last in some unwary moment; sooner 
or later you will be mine." 

Very far they rode that night, and in the morning he stopped 
outside the lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy 
river. There he cut off his flowing locks with his sword, re- 
moved all his ornaments, and sent them and his horse and sword 
back to his house by Channa. Then going on he presently met 
a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so having 
divested himself of all worldly entanglements, he was free to 
pursue his search after wisdom. He made his way southward 
to a resort of hermits and teachers in a hilly spur running into 
Bengal northward from the Vindhya Mountains, close to the 
town of Rajgir. There a number of wise men lived in a warren 



358 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Map to Ulufitcatiz. 
■tttc'RISEoT 
BUDDHI5M 




of caves, going into the town for their simple supplies and 
imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such as cared 
to come to them. 

This instruction must have been very much in the style of 
the Socratic discussions that were going on in Athens a couple 
of centuries later. Gautama became versed in all the meta- 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 359 

physics of his age. But his aciite intelligence was dissatisfied 
with the solutions offered him. ' 

The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that 
power and knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, 
by fasting, sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gau- 
tama now put to the test. He betook himself with five disciple 
companions to the jungle in a gorge in the Vindhya Mountains, 
and there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances. 
His fame spread, ''like the sound of a great bell hung in the 
canopy of the skies." ^ But it brought him no sense of truth 
achieved. One day he was walking up and down, trying to 
think in spite of his enfeebled state. Suddenly he staggered 
and fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness 
of these semi-magic ways of attempting wisdom was plain to 
him. 

He amazed and horrified his five companions by demanding 
ordinary food and refusing to continue his self-mortifications. 
He had realized that whatever truth a man may reach is reached 
best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such a conception 
was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age. His 
disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state to 
Benares. The boom of the great bell ceased. Gautama the 
wonderful had fallen. 

For a time Gautama wandered alone, the loneliest figure in 
history, battling for light. 

When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, 
it makes its advances, it secures its positions step by step, with 
but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, 
with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So 
it would seem it happened to Gautama. He had seated himself 
under a great tree by the side of a river to eat, when this sense 
of clear vision came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life 
plain. He is said to have sat all day and all night in profound 
thought, and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world. 



Such is the plain story of Gautama as we gather it from a 
comparison of early writings. But common men must have 
their cheap marvels and wonders. 

*The Burmese Chronicle, quoted by Rhys Davids. 



S60 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

It is nothing to them that this little planet should at last pro- 
duce upon its surface a man thinking of the past and the future 
and the essential nature of existence. And so we must have 
this sort of thing by some worthy Pali scribe, making the most 
of it: 

"When the conflict began between the Saviour of the World 
and the Prince of Evil a thousand appalling meteors fell. . . . 
Rivers flowed back towards their sources ; peaks and lofty moun- 
tains where countless trees had grown for ages rolled crumbling 
to the earth . . , the sun enveloped itself in awful darkness, 
and a host of headless spirits filled the air." ^ 

Of which phenomena history has preserved no authentication. 
Instead we have only the figure of a lonely man walking towards 
Benares. 

Extraordinary attention has been given to the tree under 
which Gautama had this sense of mental clarity. It was a 
tree of the fig genus, and from the first it was treated with 
peculiar veneration. It was called the Bo Tree. It has long 
since perished, but close at hand lives another great tree which 
may be its descendant, and in Ceylon there grows to this day 
a tree, the oldest historical tree in the world, which we know 
certainly to have been planted as a cutting from the Bo Tree 
in the year 245 b.c. From that time to this it has been care- 
fully tended and watered ; its great branches are supported by 
pillars, and the earth has been terraced up about it so that it 
has been able to put out fresh roots continually. It helps us 
to realize the shortness of all human history to see so many 
generations spanned by the endurance of one single tree. Gau- 
tama's disciples unhappily have cared more for the preservation 
of his tree than of his thought, which from the first they mis- 
conceived and distorted. 

At Benares Gautama sought out his five pupils, who were 
still leading the ascetic life. There is an account of their hesi- 
tation to receive him when they saw him approaching. He was 
a backslider. But there was some power of personality in him 
that prevailed over their coldness, and he made them listen to 
his new convictions. For five days the discussion was carried 
on. When he had at last convinced them that he was now 
enlightened, they hailed him as the Buddha. There was already 
in those days a belief in India that at long intervals Wisdom 
'The Madhurattha Vilasimi, quoted by Rhys Davids. 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 361 

returned to the earth and was revealed to mankind through 
a chosen person known as the Buddha. According to Indian 
belief there have been many such Buddhas ; Gautama Buddha 
is only the latest one of a series. But it is doubtful if he him- 
self accepted that title or recognized that theory. In his dis- 
courses he never called himself the Buddha. 

He and his recovered disciples then formed a sort of Academy 
in the Deer Park at Benares. They made themselves huts, and 
accumulated other followers to the number of threescore or 
more. In the rainy season they remained in discourse at this 
settlement, and during the dry weather they dispersed about 
the country, each giving his version of the new teachings. All 
their teaching was done, it would seem, by word of mouth. There 
was probably no writing yet in India at all. We must remem- 
ber that in the time of Buddha it is doubtful if even the Iliad 
had been committed to writing. Probably the Mediterranean 
alphabet, which is the basis of most Indian scripts, had not yet 
reached India. The master, therefore, worked out and com- 
posed pithy and brief verses, aphorisms, and lists of "points," 
and these were expanded in the discourse of his disciples. It 
greatly helped them to have these points and aphorisms num- 
bered. The modern mind is apt to be impatient of the tendency 
of Indian thought to a numerical statement of things, the Eight- 
fold Path, the Four Truths, and so on, but this enumeration 
was a mnemonic necessity in an undocumented world. 

§ 3 

The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being 
made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and 
simple and in the closest harmony with modern ideas. It is 
beyond all dispute the achievement of one of the most penetrat- 
ing intelligences the world has ever known. 

We have what are almost certainly the authentic heads of 
his discourse to the five disciples which embodies his essential 
doctrine. All the miseries and discontents of life he traces to 
insatiable selfishness. Suffering, he teaches, is due to the 
craving individuality, to the torment of greedy desire. Until a 
man has overcome every sort of personal craving his life is 
trouble and his end sorrow. There are three principal fonns 
the craving of life takes, and all are evil. The first is the desire 



362 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to gratify the senses, sensiioiisness. The second is the desire 
for personal immortality. The third is the desire for prosperity, 
worldliness. All these mnst be overcome — that is to say, a man 
must no longer be living for himself — before life can become 
serene. But when they are indeed overcome and no longer rule 
a man's life, when the first personal pronoun has vanished from 
his private thoughts, then he has reached the higher wisdom. 
Nirvana, serenity of soul. For Nirvana does not mean, as many 
people wrongly believe, extinction, but the extinction of the 
futile personal aims that necessarily make life base or pitiful 
or dreadful. 

Now here, surely we have the completest analysis of the 
problem of the soul's peace. Every religion that is worth the 
name, every philosophy, warns us to lose ourselves in something 
greater than ourselves. ''Whosoever would save his life, shall 
lose it;" there is exactly the same lesson. 

The teaching of history, as we are unfolding it in this book, 
is strictly in accordance with this teaching of Buddha. There 
is, as we are seeing, no social order, no security, no peace or 
happiness, no righteous leadership or kingship, unless men lose 
themselves in something greater than themselves. The study 
of biological progress again reveals exactly the same process — 
the merger of the narrow globe of the individual experience in 
a wider being (compare what has been said in Chaps. XI and 
XVI). To forget oneself in gi'eater interests is to escape 
from a prison. 

The self-abnegation must be complete. From the point of 
view of Gautama, that dread of death, that gi-eed for an endless 
continuation of his mean little individual life which drove the 
Egyptian and those who learnt from him with propitiations and 
charms into the temples, was as mortal and ugly and evil a 
thing as lust or avarice or hate. The religion of Gautama is 
flatly opposite to the "immortality" religions. And his teach- 
ing is set like flint against asceticism, as a mere attempt to win 
personal power by personal pains. 

But when we come to the rule of life, the Aryan Path, by 
which we are to escape from the threefold base cravings that 
dishonour human life, then the teaching is not so clear. It is 
not so clear for one very manifest reason, Gautama had no 
knowledge nor vision of history; he had no clear sense of the 
vast and Inany-sided adventure of life opening out in space and 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 368 

time. His mind was confined within the ideas of his age and 
people, and their minds were shaped into notions of perpetual 
recurrence, of world following- world and of Buddha following 
Buddha, a stagnant circling of the universe. The idea of man- 
kind as a great Brotherhood pursuing an endless destiny under 
the God of Righteousness, the idea that was already dawning 
upon the Semitic consciousness in Babylon at this time, did not 
exist in his world. Yet his account of the Eightfold Path is, 
nevertheless, within these limitations, profoundly wise. 

Let us briefly recapitulate the eight elements of the Aryan 
Path. First, Right Views; Gautama placed the stern examina- 
tion of views and ideas, the insistence upon ti-uth as the first 
research of his followers. There was to be no clinging to 
tawdry superstitions. He condemned, for instance, the preva- 
lent belief in the transmigration of souls. In a well-known 
early Buddhist dialogue there is a destructive analysis of the 
idea of an enduring individual soul. Next to Right Views 
came Right Aspirations ; because nature abhors a vacuum, and 
since base cravings are to be expelled, other desires must be 
encouraged — love for the service of others, desire to do and 
secure justice and the like. Primitive and uncorrupted Bud- 
dhism aimed not at the destruction of desire, but at the change 
of desire. Devotion to science and art, or to the betterment of 
things manifestly falls into harmony with the Buddhistic Right 
Aspirations, provided such aims are free from jealousy or 
the craving for fame. Right Speech, Right Conduct, and Right 
Livelihood, need no expansion here. Sixthly in this list came 
Right Effort, for Gautama had no toleration for good intentions 
and slovenly application; the disciple had to keep a keenly 
critical eye upon his activities. The seventh element of the 
path. Right Mindfulness, is the constant guard against a lapse 
into personal feeling or glory for whatever is done or not done. 
And, finally, comes Right Rapture, which seems to be aimed 
against the pointless ecstacies of the devout, such witless glory- 
ings, for instance, as those that went to the jingle of the Alex- 
andrian sistrum. 

We will not discuss here the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, 
because it belongs to a world of thought that is passing away. 
The good or evil of every life was supposed to determine the 
happiness or misery of some subsequent life, that was in some 
inexplicable way identified with its predecessor. Nowadays we 



364, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

realize that a life goes on in its consequences for ever, but we 
find no necessity to suppose that any particular life resumes 
again. The Indian mind was full of the idea of cyclic re- 
currence ; everything was supposed to come round again. This 
is a very natural supposition for men to make; so things seem 
to be until we analyze them. Modern science has made clear 
to us that there is no such exact recurrence as we are apt to 
suppose; every day is by an infinitesimal quantity a little 
longer than the day before; no generation repeats the previous 
generation precisely ; hietory never repeats itself ; change, we 
realize now, is inexhaustible ; all things are eternally new. But 
these differences between our general ideas and those Buddha 
must have possessed need not in any way prevent us from 
appreciating the unprecedented wisdom, the goodness, and the 
greatness of this plan of an emancipated life as Gautama laid 
it down somewhen in the sixth century before Christ. 

And if he failed in theory to gather together all the wills 
of the converted into the one multifarious activity of our race, 
battling against death and deadness in time and space, he did 
in practice direct his own life and that of all his immediate 
disciples into one progressive adventure, which was to preach 
and spread the doctrine and methods of Nirvana or soul- 
serenity throughout our fevered world. For them at least his 
teaching was complete and full. But all men cannot preach or 
teach ; doctrine is but one of many of the functions of life that 
are fundamentally righteous. To the modern mind it seems at 
least equally acceptable that a man may, though perhaps against 
greater difficulties, cultivate the soil, rule a city, make roads, 
build houses, construct engines, or seek and spread knowledge, 
in perfect self-forgetfulness and serenity. As much was in- 
herent in Gautama's teaching, but the stress was certainly laid 
upon the teaching itself, and upon withdrawal from rather than 
upon the ennoblement of the ordinary affairs of men. 

In certain other respects this primitive Buddhism differed 
from any of the religions we have hitherto considered. It was 
primarily a religion of conduct, not a religion of observances 
and sacrifices. It had no temples, and since it had no sacrifices, 
it had no sacred order of priests. Nor had it any theology. It 
neither asserted nor denied the reality of the innumerable and 
often grotesque gods who were worshipped in India at that 
time. It passed them by. 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 365 



From the very first, this new teaching was misconceived. One 
corniption was perhaps inherent in its teaching. Because the 
world of men had as yet no sense of the continuous progressive 
effort of life, it was very easy to slip from the idea of renouncing 
self to the idea of renouncing active life. As Gautama's own 
experiences had shown, it is easier to flee from this world than 
from self. His early disciples were strenuous thinkers and 
teachers, hut the lapse into mere monastic seclusion was a very 
easy one, particularly easy in the climate of India, where an 
extreme simplicity of living is convenient and attractive, and 
exertion more laborious than anywhere else in the world. 

And it was early the fate of Gautama, as it has been the fate 
of most religious founders since his days, to be made into a 
wonder by his less intelligent disciples in their efforts to impress 
the outer world. We have already noted how one devout fol- 
lower could not but believe that the moment of the master's 
mental irradiation must necessarily have been marked by an 
epileptic fit of the elements. This is one small sample of the 
vast accumulation of vulgar marvels that presently sprang up 
about the memory of Gautama. 

There can be no doubt that for the great multitude of human 
beings then as now the more idea of an emancipation from self 
is a very difficult one to grasp. It is probable that even among 
the teachers Buddha was sending out from Benares there were 
many who did not grasp it and still less were able to convey it to 
their hearers. Their teaching quite naturally took on the aspect 
of salvation not from oneself — that idea was beyond them — but 
from misfortunes and sufferings here and hereafter. In the 
existing superstitions of the people, and especially in the idea 
of the transmigration of the soul after death, though this idea 
was contrary to the Master's own teaching, they found stuff of 
fear they could work upon. They urged virtue upon the people 
lest they should live again in degraded or miserable forms, or fall 
into some one of the innumerable hells of torment with which 
the Brahminical teachers had already familiarized their minds. 
They represented Buddha as the saviour from almost unlimited 
torment. 

There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid 
disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they 



S66 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



regard as the success of their propaganda. Men who would 
scorn to tell a lie in everyday life will become unscrupulous 
cheats and liars when they have given themselves up to propa- 
gandist work; it is one of the perplexing absurdities of our 
human nature. Such honest souls, for most of them were in- 
dubitably honest, were presently telling their hearers of the 
miracles that attended the Buddha's birth— they no longer called 
him Gautama, because that was too familiar a name — of his 

youthful feats of 



Harlti 

(pddniirug 



strength, of the marvels 
of his everyday life, 
winding up with a sort 
of illumination of his 
body at the moment of 
death. Of course it was 
impossible to believe 
that Buddha was the 
son of a mortal father. 
He was miraculously 
conceived through his 
mother dreaming of a 
beautiful white ele- 
phant ! Previously he 
had himself been a mar- 
vellous elephant with 
six tusks ; he had gen- 
erously given them all 
to a needy hunter — 
and even helped him to 
saw them off. And so 



Moreover, a theology 
grew up about Buddha. 
He was discovered to 
be a god. He was one 
of a series of divine beings, the Buddhas. There was an un- 
dying "Spirit of all the Buddhas" ; there was a great series 
of Buddhas past and Buddhas (or Buddisatvas) yet to come. 
But we cannot go further into these complications of Asiatic 
theology. "Under the overpowering influence of these sickly 
imaginations the moral teachings of Gautama have been almost 




[dfbir Foudier] 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 367 

hid from view. The theories grew and flourished ; each new 
step, each new hypothesis, demanded another ; until the whole 
sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and 
simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were smothered 
beneath the glittering mass of metaphysical subtleties." ^ 

In the third century b.c. Buddhism was gaining wealth and 
power, and the little gToups of simple huts in which the teachers 
of the Order gathered in the rainy season were giving place to 
substantial monastic buildings. To this period belong the begin- 
nings of Buddhistic art. Now if we remember how recent was 
the adventure of Alexander, that all the Punjab was still under 
Seleucid rule, that all India abounded with Greek adventurers, 
and that there was still quite open communication by sea and 
land with Alexandria, it is no great wonder to find that this 
early Buddhist art was strongly Greek in character, and that the 
new Alexandrian cult of Serapis and Isis was extraordinarily 
influential in its development. 

The kingdom of Gandhara on the north-west frontier near 
Peshawar, which flourished in the third century b.c, was a typ- 
ical meeting-place of the Hellenic and Indian worlds. Here are 
to be found the earliest Buddhist sculptures, and interwoven 
with them are figures which are recognizably the figures of 
Serapis and Isis and Horns already worked into the legendary 
net that gathered about Buddha. No doubt the Greek artists 
who came to Gandhara were loth to relinquish a familiar theme. 
But Isis, w^e are told, is no longer Isis but Hariti, a pestilence 
goddess whom Buddha converted and made benevolent. Foucher 
traces Isis from this centre into China, but here other influences 
were also at work, and the story becomes too complex for us 
to disentangle in this Outline.- China had a Taoist deity, the 
Holy ]\Iother, the Queen of Heaven, who took on the name 
(originally a male name) of Kuan-yin and who came to re- 
semble the Isis figiire very closely. The Isis figures, we feel, 
must have influenced the treatment of Kuan-yin. Like Isis 
she was also Queen of the Seas, Stella Maris. In Japan she 
was called Kwannon. There seems to have been a constant 
exchange of the outer forms of religion between east and west. 
We read in Hue's Travels how perplexing he and his fellow 

^ Rhys Davids, Buddhism. 

^ See R. F, Johnston, Buddhist China. — L. C. B. 



368 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

missionary found this possession of a common tradition of wor- 
ship. ''The cross," he says, "the mitre, the dahnatica, the cope, 
which the Grand Lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are 
performing some ceremony out of the temple; the sei'vice with 
double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer, suspended 
from five chains, which you can open or close at pleasure; the 
benedictions given by the Lamas by extending the right hand 
over the heads of the faithful ; the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, 
spiritual retirement, the worship of the saints, the fasts, the 
processions, the litanies, the holy water, all these are analogies 
between the Buddhists and ourselves." ^ 

The cult and doctrine of Gautama, gathering corruptions and 
variations from Brahminism and Hellenism alike, was spread 
throughout India by an increasing multitude of teachers in the 
fourth and third centuries B.C. For some generations at least 
it retained much of the moral beauty and something of the 
simplicity of the opening phase. Many people who have no 
intellectual grasp upon the meaning of self-abnegation and dis- 
interestedness have nevertheless the ability to appreciate a splen- 
dour in the reality of these qualities. Early Buddhism was 
certainly producing noble lives, and it is not only through rea- 
son that the latent response to nobility is aroused in our minds. 
It spread rather in spite of than because of the concessions that 
it made to vulgar imaginations. It spread because many of 
the early Buddhists were sweet and gentle, helpful and noble 
and admirable people, who compelled belief in their sustaining 
faith. 

Quite early in its career Buddhism came into conflict with 
the growing pretensions of the Brahmins. As we have already 
noted, this priestly caste was still only struggling to dominate 
Indian life in the days of Gautama. They had already great 
advantages. They had the monopoly of tradition and religious 
sacrifices. But their power was being challenged by the de- 
velopment of kingship, for the men who became clan leaders and 
kings were usually not of the Brahminical caste. 

Kingship received an impetus from the Persian and Greek 
invasions of the Punjab. We have already noted the name of 
King Porus whom, in spite of his elephants, Alexander de- 
feated and turned into a satrap. There came also to the Greek 
camp upon the Indus a certain adventurer named Chandra- 

* Hue's Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China. 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 



369 



gnpta Maiirya, whom the Greeks called Sandracottus, with a 
scheme for conquering the Ganges country. The scheme was 
not welcome to the Macedonians, who were in revolt against 
marching any further into India, and he had to fly the camp. 
He wandered among the tribes upon the north-west frontier, se- 
cured their support, and after Alexander 
had departed, overran the Punjab, ousting 
the Macedonian representatives. He then 
conquered the Ganges country (321 B.C.), 
waged a successful war (303 b.c.) against 
Seleucus (Seleucus I) when the latter at- 
tempted to recover the Punjab, and con- 
solidated a great empire reaching across 
all the plain of northern India from the 
western to the eastern sea. And this King 
Chandragupta came into much "the same 
conflict with the gi-owing power of the 
Brahmins, into the conflict between crown 
and priesthood, that we have already noted 
as happening in Babylonia and Egypt and 
China. He saw in the spreading doctrine 
of Buddhism an ally against the growth 
of priestcraft and caste. He supported 
and endowed the Buddhistic Order, and 
encouraged its teachings. 

He was succeeded by his son, who con- 
quered Madras and was in turn succeeded by Asoka (264 to 
227 B.C.), one of the great monarchs of history, whose do- 
minions extended from Afghanistan to Madras. Pie is the only 
military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after vic- 
tory. He had invaded Kalinga (255 b.c), a country along the 
east coast of Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing 
the conquest of the tip of the Indian peninsukt. The expedi- 
tion was successful, but he was disgusted by what he saw of 
the cruelties and horrors of war. He declared, in certain in- 
scriptions that still exist, that he would no longer seek conquest 
by war, but by religion, and the rest of his life was devoted to 
the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world. 

He seems to have ruled his vast empire in peace and with 
great ability. He was no mere religious fanatic. But in the 




Chinese Image 

KuAN-YIN 



S70 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



year of his one and only war he joined the Buddhist community 
as a layman, and some years later he became a full member 
of the Order, and devoted himself to the attainment of Nirvana 
by the Eightfold Path. How entirely compatible that way of 
living then was with the most useful and beneficent activities his 
life shows. Eight Aspiration, Right Effort, and Right Liveli- 




BuddhiszTL - 



hood distinguished his career. He organized a great digging; of 
wells in India, and the planting of trees for shade. He ap- 
pointed officers for the supervision of charitable works. He 
founded hospitals and public gardens. He had gardens made 
for the growing of medicinal herbs. Had he had an Aristotle to 
inspire him, he would no doubt have endowed scientific research 
upon a great scale. He created a ministry for the care of the 
aborigines and subject races. He made provision for the educa- 
tion of women. He made, he was the first monarch to make, 
an attempt to educate his people into a common view of the ends 
and way of life. He made vast benefactions to the Buddhist 
teaching orders, and tried to stimulate them to a better study 
of their own literature. All over the land he set up long inscrip- 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 371 

tions rehearsing the teaching of Gautama, and it is the simple 
and human teaching and not the preposterous accretions. Thir- 
tj-five of his inscriptions survive to this day. Moreover, he sent 
missionaries to spread tJie noble and reasonable teaching of his 
master throughout the world, to Kashmir, to Ceylon, to the 
Seleucids, and the Ptolemies. It was one of these missions which 
carried that cutting of the Bo Tree, of which we have already 
told, to Ceylon. 

For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real 
needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of mon- 
archs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and 
graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, 
the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From 
the Volga to Japan his name is still honoured. China, Tibet, 
and even India, though it has left his doctrine, preserve the 
tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory 
to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or 
Charlemagne. 

§ 5 

It is thought that the vast benefactions of Asoka finally cor- 
rupted Buddhism by attracting to its Order great numbers of 
mercenary and insincere adherents, but there can be no doubt 
that its rapid extension throughout Asia was very largely due 
to his stimulus. 

It made its way into Central Asia through Afghanistan and 
Turkestan, and so reached China. Buddhist teaching had 
spread widely in China before 200 b.c. Buddhism found there 
a popular and prevalent religion, Taoism, a development of very 
ancient and primitive magic and occult practices. It was reor- 
ganized as a distinctive cult by Chang Daoling in the days 
of the Han dynasty. Tao means the Way, which corresponds 
closely with the idea of the Aryan Path. The two religions 
spread side by side and underwent similar changes, so that 
nowadays their outward practice is very similar. Buddhism 
also encountered Confucianism, which was even less theological 
and even more a code of personal conduct. And finally it en- 
countered the teachings of Lao Tse, "anarchist, evolutionist, 
pacifist and moral philosopher," ^ which were not so much a 
' S. N. Fu. 



372 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

religion as a philosophical rule of life. The teachings of this 
Lao Tse were later to become incorporated with the Taoist re- 
ligion by Chen Tuan, the founder of modern Taoism. 

Confucius, the founder of Confucianism, like the great south- 
ern teacher Lao Tse and Gautama, lived also in the sixth cen- 
tury B.C. His life has some interesting parallelisms with that 
of some of the more political of the Greek philosophers of the 
fifth and fourth. The sixth century b.c, falls into the period 
assigned by Chinese historians to the Chow Dynasty, but in those 
days the rule of that dynasty had become little more than 
nominal ; the emperor conducted the traditional sacrifices of the 
Son of Heaven, and received a certain formal respect. Even 
his nominal empire was not a sixth part of the China of to-day. 
In Chapter XIV we have already glanced at the state of affairs 
in China at this time; practically China was a multitude of 
warring states open to the northern barbarians. Confucius was 
a subject in one of those states, Lu ; he was of aristocratic birth, 
but poor; and, after occupying various official positions, he set 
up a sort of Academy in Lu for the discovery and imparting 
of Wisdom. And we also find Confucius travelling from state 
to state in China, seeking a prince who would make him his 
counsellor and become the centre of a reformed world. Plato, 
two centuries later, in exactly the same spirit, went as ad- 
viser to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, and we have already 
noted the attitudes of Aristotle and Isocrates towards Philip 
of Macedonia. 

The teaching of Confucius centred upon the idea of a noble 
life which he embodied in a standard or ideal, the Aristocratic 
Man. This phrase is often translated into English as the 
Superior Person, but as ''superior" and "person," like "re- 
spectable" and "genteel," have long become semi-humorous 
terms of abuse, this rendering is not fair to Confucianism. He 
did present to his time the ideal of a devoted public man. The 
public side was very important to him. He was far more 
of a constructive political thinker than Gautama or Lao Tse. 
His mind was full of the condition of China, and he sought to 
call the Aristocratic Man into existence very largely in order 
to produce the noble state. One of his sayings may be quoted 
here: "It is impossible to withdraw from the world, and asso- 
ciate with birds and beasts that have no affinity with us. With 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 373 

whom should I associate but with suffering men ? The disorder 
that prevails is what requires my efforts. If right principles 
ruled through the kingdom, there would be no necessity for me 
to change its state." 

The political basis of his teaching seems to be characteristic 
of Chinese moral ideas ; there is a much director reference to 
the State than is the case with most Indian and European moral 
and religious doctrine. For a time he was appointed magis- 
trate in Chung-tu, a city of the dukedom of Lu, and here he 
sought to regulate life to an extraordinary extent, to subdue 
every relationship and action indeed to the rule of an elaborate 
etiquette. ''Ceremonial in every detail, such as we are wont 
to see only in the courts of iiilers and the households of high 
dignitaries, became obligatory on the people at large, and all 
matters of daily life were subject to rigid rule. Even the food 
which the different classes of people might eat was regailated; 
males and females were kept apart in the streets; even the thick- 
ness of coffins and the shape and situation of graves were made 
the subject of regulations.^ 

This is all, as people say, very Chinese. No other people 
have ever approached moral order and social stability through 
the channel of manners. Yet in China, at any rate, the methods 
of Confucius have had an enormous effect, and no nation in the 
world to-day has such a universal tradition of decorum and 
self-restraint. 

Later on the influence of Confucius over his duke was under- 
mined, and he withdrew again into private life. His last days 
were saddened by the deaths of some of his most promising 
disciples. *'No intelligent ruler," he said, "arises to take me 
as his master, and my time has come to die." . . . 

But he died to live. Says Hirth, ''There can be no doubt 
that Confucius has had a greater influence on the development 
of the Chinese national character than many emperors taken 
together. He is, therefore, one of the essential figures to be 
considered in connection with any history of China. That he 
could influence his nation to such a degree was, it appears to me, 
due more to the peculiarity of the nation than to that of his 
own personality. Had he lived in any other part of the world, 
his name would perhaps be forgotten. As we have seen, he had 

•Hirth's The Atident History of China. 



374 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 375 

formed his character and his personal views on man's life from 
a careful stndy of documents closely connected with the moral 
philosophy cultivated by fonner generations. What he preached 
to his contemporaries was, therefore, not all new to them ; but, 
having himself, in the study of old records, heard the dim voice 
of the sages of the past, he became, as it were, the megaphone 
phonograph through wdiich were expressed to the nation those 
views which he had derived from the early development of the 
nation itself. . . . The great influence of Confucius's person- 
ality on national life in China was due not only to his writings 
and his teachings as recorded by others, but also to his doings. 
His personal character, as described by his disciples and in the 
accounts of later writers, some of which may be entirely legen- 
dary, has become the pattern for millions of those who are bent 
on imitating the outward manners of a great man. . . . What- 
ever he did in public was regulated to the minutest detail by 
ceremony. This was no invention of his own, since ceremonial 
life had been cultivated many centuries before Confucius ; but 
his authority and example did much to perpetuate what he con- 
sidered desirable social practices." 

The Chinese speak of Buddhism and the doctrines of Lao 
Tse and Confucius as the Three Teachings. Together they con- 
stitute the basis and point of departure of all later Chinese 
thought. Their thorough study is a necessary preliminary to 
the establishment of any real intellectual and moral commu- 
nity between the great people of the East and the Western 
world. 

There are certain things to be remarked in common of all 
these three teachers, of whom Gautama was indisputably the 
greatest and profoundest, whose doctrines to this day dominate 
the thought of the great majority of human beings ; there are 
certain features in which their teaching contrasts with the 
thoughts and feelings that were soon to take possession of the 
Western world. Primarily they are personal and tolerant doc- 
trines; they are doctrines of a Way, of a Path, of a Nobility, 
and not doctrines of a church or a general rule. And they 
offer nothing either for or against the existence and worship 
of the current gods. The Athenian philosophers, it is to be 
noted, had just the same theological detachment ! Socrates was 
quite willing to bow politely or sacrifice formally to almost any 
divinity, — reserving his private thoughts. This attitude is flatly 



376 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

antagonistic to the state of mind that was growing up in the 
Jewish communities of Jiidea, Egypt, and Babylonia, in 
which the thought of the one God was iirst and foremost. Neither 
Gautama nor Lao Tse nor Confucius had any inkling of thiy 
idea of a jealous God, a God who would have ''none other gods," 
a God of terrible Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking be- 
lief in magic, witchcraft, or old customs, or any sacrificing to 
the god-king or any trifling with the stern unity of things. 

§ 6 

The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith 
clear and clean. The theological disregard of the great Eastern 
teachers, neither assenting nor denying, did on the other hand 
permit elaborations of explanation and accumulations of ritual 
from the very beginning. Except for Gautama's insistence 
upon Right Views, which was easily disregarded, there was no 
sel f -cleansing element in either Buddhism, Taoism, or Confu- 
cianism. There was no effective prohibition of superstitious 
practices, spirit raising, incantations, prostrations, and sup- 
plementary worships. At an early stage a process of encrusta- 
tion began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every 
disease of the corrupt religions they sought to replace; they 
took over the idols and the temples, the altars and the censers. 

Tibet to-day is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he 
return to earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his 
own teaching in vain. He would find that most ancient type 
of human ruler, a god-king, enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the 
"living Buddha." At Lhassa he would find a huge temple filled 
with priests, abbots, and lamas — he whose only buildings were 
huts and who made no priests — and above a high altar he would 
behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called 
"Gautama Buddha" ! He would hear services intoned before 
this divinity, and certain precepts, which would be dimly famil- 
iar to him, murmured as responses. Bells, incense, prostrations, 
would play their part in these amazing proceedings. At one 
point in the service a bell would be iimg and a mirror lifted up, 
while the whole congregation, in an access of reverence, bowed 
lower. . . . 

About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a num- 
ber of curious little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water- 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 377 




378 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

wheels spinning, on which brief prayers were inscribed. Every 
time these things spin, he would learn, it counts as a prayer. 
"To whom ?" he would ask. Moreover, there would be a number 
of flagstaffs in the land carrying beautiful silk flags, silk flags 
which bore the perplexing inscription, "0//i Mani padme hum," 
"the jewel is in the lotus." Whenever the flag flaps, he would 
learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who 
paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen, 
employed by pious persons, would be going about the country 
cutting this precious formula on cliff and stone. And this, he 
would realize at last, was what the world had made of his re- 
ligion ! Beneath this gaudy glitter was buried the Aryan Way 
to serenity of soul. 

We have already noted the want of any progressive idea in 
primitive Buddhism. In that again it contrasted with Judaism. 
The idea of a Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous 
or contemporary religion displayed ; it made Judaism historical 
and dramatic. It justified its fierce intolerance because it 
pointed to an aim. In spite of tlie truth and profundity of the 
psychological side of Gautama's teaching, Buddhism stagnated 
and corrupted for the lack of that directive idea. Judaism, it 
must be confessed, in its earlier phases, entered but little into 
the souls of men ; it let them remain lustful, avaricious, worldly 
or superstitious ; but because of its persuasion of a promise and 
of a divine leadership to serve divine ends, it remained in 
comparison with Buddhism bright and expectant, like a cared- 
for sword. 



For some time Buddhism flourished in India. But Brahmin- 
ism, with its many gods and its endless variety of cults, always 
flourished by its side, and the organization of the Brahmins grew 
more powerful, until at last they were able to turn upon this 
caste-denying cult and oust it from India altogether. The story 
of that struggle is not to be told here; there were persecutions 
and reactions, but by the eleventh century, except for Orissa, 
Buddhist teaching was extinct in India. Much of its gen- 
tleness and charity had, however, become incorporated with 
Brahminism. 

Over great areas of the world, as our map has shown, it still 
survives; and it is quite possible that in contact with western 



THE RISE AND SPREAD OF BUDDHISM 379 

science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teach- 
ing of Gautama, revived and purified, may yet play a large part 
in the direction of human destiny. 

But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the 
lives of any Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the 
one great Aryan religion is now almost exclusively confined to 
Mongolian peoples, the Aryans themselves are under the sway of 
two religions, Christianity and Islam, which are, as we shall see, 
essentially Semitic. And both Buddhism and Christianity wear 
garments of ritual and formula that seem to be derived through 
Hellenistic channels from that land of temples and priestcraft, 
Egypt, and from the more primitive and fundamental mentality 
of the brown Hamitic peoples. 



XXVI 

THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 

1. The Beginnings of the Latins. % 2. A New Sort of 
State. § 3. The Carthaginian Repuhlic of Rich Men. § 4. 
The First Punic War. § 5. Cato the Elder and the Spirit 
of Cato. § 6. The Second Punic War. § 7. The Third 
Punic War. § 8, How the Punic War Undermined Roman 
Liberty. § 9. Comparison of the Roman Repuhlic with a. 
Modern State. 



IT is now necessary to take up the history of the two great 
republics of the Western Mediterranean, Rome and Car- 
thage, and to tell how Rome succeeded in maintaining for 
some centuries an empire even greater than that achieved by 
the conquests of Alexander. But this new empire was, as we 
shall try to make clear, a political structure differing very pro- 
foundly in its nature from any of the great Oriental empires 
that had preceded it. Great changes in the texture of human 
society and in the conditions of social interrelations had been 
going on for some centuries. The flexibility and transferability 
of money was becoming a power and, like all powers in inexpert 
hands, a danger in human affairs. It was altering the relations 
of rich men to the state and to their poorer fellow citizens. This 
new empire, the Roman empire, imlike all the preceding em- 
pires, was not the creation of a great conqueror. No Sargon, 
no Thothmes, no Nebuchadnezzar, no Cyrus nor Alexander nor 
Chandragupta, was its fountain head. It was made by a repub- 
lic. It grew by a kind of necessity through new concentrating 
and unifying forces that were steadily gathering power in human 
affairs. 

But first it is necessary to give some idea of the state of affairs 
in Italy in the centuries immediately preceding the appearance 
of Rome in the world's story. 

380 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 



381 



Before 1200 b.c, that is to say before the rise of the Assyrian 
empire, the siege of Troy, and the final destruction of Cnossos, 
but after the time of Amenophis IV, Italy, like Spain, was 
probably still inhabited mainly by dark white people of the 
more fundamental Iberian or Mediterranean race. This ab- 
original population was probably a thin and backward one. 
But already in Italy, as in Greece, the Aryans were coming 
southward. By 1000 b.c. immigrants from the north had set- 
tled over most of the north and centre of Italy, and, as in 
Greece, they had intermarried with their darker predecessors 



lr/^^ wEsr^KN. mediterratmean . soo-booB.c, 




Greeks... 
Latins & other 
Italians.. 


ip 




1 




iT mI 


Cartka^jiiajis 
& PhaenicLans. 


Sm 



and established a group of Aryan languages, the Italian group, 
more akin to the Keltic (Gaelic) than to any other, of which the 
most interesting from the historical point of view was that 
spoken by the Latin tribes in the plains south and east of the 
river Tiber. Meanwhile the Greeks had been settling down in 
Greece, and now they were taking to the sea and crossing over 
to South Italy and Sicily and establishing themselves there. 
Subsequently they established colonies along the French Kiviera 
and founded Marseilles upon the site of an older Phoenician 
colony. Another interesting people also had come into Italy by 
sea. These were a brownish sturdy people, to judge from the 



382 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



pictures they have left of themselves ; very probably they were 
a tribe of those ^gean "dark whites" who were being driven out 
of Greece and Asia Minor and the islands in between by the 
Greeks. We have already told the tale of Cnossos (Chapter 
XV) and of the settlement of the kindred Philistines in Pales- 
tine (Chapter XIX, § 1). These Etruscans, as they were 




40 Miles 



called in Italy, were known even in ancient times to be of 
Asiatic origin, and it is tempting, but probably unjustifiable, to 
connect this tradition with the ^'Eneid, the sham epic of the 
Latin poet Virgil, in which the Latin civilization is ascribed 
to Trojan immigrants from Asia Minor. (But the Trojans 
themselves were probably an Aryan people allied to the Phry- 
gians.) These Etruscan people conquered most of Italy north 
of the Tiber from the Aryan tribes who were scattered over 
that country. Probably the Etruscans ruled over a subjugated 
Italian population, so reversing the state of affairs in Greece, 
in which the Aryans were uppermost. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 383 

Our map, which may be taken to represent roughly the state 
of affairs about 750 b.c, also shows the establishments of the 
Phoenician traders, of which Carthage was the chief, along 
the shores of Africa and Spain. 

Of all the peoples actually in Italy, the Etruscans were by 
far the most civilized. They built sturdy fortresses of the 
Myca^nean type of architecture; they had a metal industry; 
they used imjwrted Greek pottery of a very fine type. The 
Latin tribes on the other side of the Tiber were by comparison 
barbaric. 

The Latins were still a rude farming people. The centre of 
their worship was a temple to the tribal god Jupiter, upon the 
Alban Mount. There they gathered for their chief festivals 
\ery much after the fashion of the early tribal gathering we 
have already imagined at Avebury. This gathering-place was 
not a town. It was a high place of assembly. There was no 
population permanently there. There were, however, twelve 
townships in the Latin league. At one point upon the Tiber 
there was a ford, and here there was a trade between Latins 
and Etruscans. At this ford Rome had its beginnings. Trad- 
ers assembled there, and refugees from the twelve towns found 
an asylum and occupation at this trading centre. LTpon the 
seven hills near the ford a number of settlements sprang up, 
which finally amalgamated into one city. 

Most people have heard the story of the two brothers Romulus 
and Remiis, who founded Rome, and the legend of how they 
were exposed as infants and sheltered and suckled by a wolf. 
Little value. is now attached to this tale by modem historians. 
The date 753 b.c. is given for the founding of Rome, but there 
are Etruscan tombs beneath the Roman Forum of a much 
earlier date than that, and the so-called tomb of Romulus bears 
an indecipherable Etruscan inscription. 

The peninsula of Italy was not then the smiling land of 
vineyards and olive orchards it has since become. It was still 
a rough country of marsh and forest, in which the farmers grazed 
their cattle and made their clearings. Rome, on the boundary 
between Latin and Etruscan, was not in a very strong position 
for defence. At first there were perhaps Latin kings in Rome, 
then it would seem the city fell into the hands of Etruscan 
rulers whose tyrannous conduct led at last to their expulsion, 
and Rome became a Latin-speaking republic. The Etruscan 



384 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



kings were expelled from Rome in the sixth century b.c, while 
the successors of Nebuchadnezzar were ruling by the sufferance 
of the Medes in Babylon, while Confucius was seeking a king 
to reform the disorders of China, and while Gautama was 
teaching the Aryan Way to his disoiples at Benares. 




IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIH 

Etruscazi -painting of a Ccremozuzl 'Brtrrung^ of tiw 'DeaoL'-' 



Of the struggle between the Romans and the Etniscans we 
cannot tell in any detail here. The Etruscans were the better 
armed, the more civilized, and the more numerous, and it would 
probably have gone hard with the Romans if they had had to 
light them alone. But two disasters happened to the Etruscans 
which so weakened them that the Remans were able at last to 
master them altogether. The first of these was a war with 
the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily which destroyed the Etruscan 
fleet (474 b.c), and the second was a great raid of the Gauls 
from the north into Italy. These latter people swarmed into 
ISI'orth Italy and occupied the valley of the Po towards the end 
of the fifth century B.C., as a couple of centuries later their 
kindred were to swarm down into Greece and Asia Minor and 
settle in Galatia. The Etruscans were thus caught between 
hammer and anvil, and after a long and intermittent war the 
Romans were able to capture Veil, an Etruscan fortress, a few 
miles from Rome, which had hitherto been a great threat and 
annoyance to them. 

It is to this period of struggle against the Etiiiscan monarchs, 
the Tarquins, that Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, familiar 
to every schoolboy, refer. 

But the invasion of the Gauls was one of those convulsions 
of the nations that leave nothing as it has been before. They 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 385 

carried their raiding right down the Italian peninsula, devastat- 
ing all Etniria. They took and sacked Rome (390 b.c). 
According to Roman legends— on which doubt is thrown — the 
citadel on the Capitol held out, and this also the Gauls would 
have taken by surprise at night, if certain geese had not been 
awakened by their stealthy movements and set up such a cack- 
ling as to arouse the garrison. After that the Gauls, who were 
ill-equipped for siege operations, and perhaps suffering from dis- 
ease in their camp, were bought off, and departed to the north- 
ward again, and, though they made subsequent raids, they never 
again reached Rome. 

The leader of the Gauls who sacked Rome was named Bren- 
nus. It is related of him that as the gold of the ransom was 
being weighed, there was some dispute about the justice of the 
counterpoise, whereupon he flung his sword into the scale, saying, 
"Vw victis!" C'Woe to the vanquished!") — a phrase that has 
haunted the discussions of all subsequent ransoms and indem- 
nities down to the present time. 

For half a century after this experience Rome was engaged 
in a series of wars to establish herself at the head of the Latin 
tribes. For the burning of the chief city seems to have stim- 
ulated rather than crippled her energies. However much she 
had suffered, most of her neighbours seem to have suffered 
more. By 290 b.c. Rome was the mistress city of all Central 
Italy from the Arno to south of Naples. She had conquered 
the Etruscans altogether, and her boundaries marched with 
those of the Gauls to the north and with the regions of Italy 
under Greek dominion (Magna Gi-secia) to the south. Along 
the Gaulish boundary she had planted garrisons and colonial 
cities, and no doubt it was because of that line of defence that 
the raiding enterprises of the Gauls were deflected eastward 
into the Balkans. 

After what we have already told of the history of Greece 
and the constitutions of her cities, it will not surprise the reader 
to learn that the Greeks of Sicily and Italy were divided up 
into a number of separate city governments, of which Syracuse 
and Tarentum (the modern Taranto) were the chief, and that 
they had no common rule of direction or policy. But now, 
alarmed at the spread of the Roman power, they looked across 
the Adriatic for help, and found it in the ambitions of Pyrrhus, 



386 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



the king of Epirus. Between the Romans and Pyrrhus these 
Greeks of Magna Grsecia were very much in the same position 
that Greece proper had heen in, between the Macedonians and 
the Persians half a century before. 

The reader will remember that Epirns, the part of Greece 



"TEc 'ROMAN VaWZV, aBzr ^ SAMISTITE TX^R5 



[Beginning of tivz. -5^ 
Century.. Campsire with. 




that is closest to the heel of Italy, was the native land of 
Olympias, the mother of Alexander, In the kaleidoscopic 
changes of the map that followed the death of Alexander, 
Epims was sometimes swamped by Macedonia, sometimes in- 
dependent. This Pyrrhus was a kinsman of Alexander the 
Great, and a monarch of ability and enterprise, and he seems 
to have planned a career of conquest in Italy and Sicily. He 
commanded an admirable army, against which the oompara- 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 



S87 



tively inexpert Roman levies could at first do little. His army 
included all the established military devices of the time, an 
infantry phalanx, Thessalian cavalry, and twenty fighting ele- 
phants from the east. He routed the Romans at Heraclea (280 
B.C.), and, pressing after them, defeated them again at Auscu- 




liun (279 B.C.) in their own territory. Then, instead of pursu- 
ing the Romans further, he made a truce with them, turned his 
attention to the subjugation of Sicily, and so brought the sea 
power of Carthage into alliance against him. For Carthage 
could not afi^ord to have a strong power established so close to 
her as Sicily. Rome in those days seemed to the Carthaginians 
a far less serious threat than the possibility of another Alexan- 
der the Great ruling Sicily. A Carthaginian fleet appeared off 
the mouth of the Tiber, therefore, to encourage or induce the 



S88 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Romans to renew the struggle, and Rome and Carthage were 
definitely allied against the invader. 

This interposition of Carthage was fatal to Pyn-hus. With- 
out any decisive battle his power wilted, and, after a disastrous 
repulse in an attack upon the Roman camp of Beneventum, he 
had to retire to Epirus (275 b.c). 

It is recorded that when Pyrrhus left Sicily, he said he left 
it to be the battleground of Rome and Carthage. He was 
killed three years later in a battle in the streets of Argos. The 
war against Pyrrhus was won by the Carthaginian fleet, and 
Rome reaped a full half of the harvest of victory, Sicily fell 
completely to Carthage, and Rome came down to the toe and 
heel of Italy, and looked across the Straits of Messina at her 
new rival. In eleven years' time (264 b.c.) the prophecy of 
Pyrrhus was fulfilled, and the first war with Carthage, the first 
of the three Punic^ Wars, had begun. 



§ 2 

But we write "Rome" and the ''Romans," and we have still 
to explain what manner of people these were who were playing 
a role of conquest that had hitherto been played only by able 
and aggressive monarchs. 

Their state was, in the fifth century b.c, a republic of the 
Aryan type very similar to a Greek aristocratic republic. The 
earliest accounts of the social life of Rome give us a picture 
of a very primitive Aryan community "In the second half 
of the fifth century before Christ, Rome was still an aristocratic 
community of free peasants, occupying an area of nearly 400 
square miles, with a population certainly not exceeding 150,000, 
almost entirely dispersed over the country-side and divided into 
seventeen districts or rviral tribes. Most of the families had a 
small holding and a cottage of their own, where father and 
sons lived and worked together, growing corn for the most part, 
with here and there a strip of vine or olive. Their few head of 
cattle were kept at pasture on the neighbouring common land ; 
their clothes and simple implements of husbandry they made 
for themselves at home. Only at rare intervals and on special 

* Latin Poeni = Carthaginians. Punicus (adj.) = Carthaginian, i.e. 
Phoenician. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 



389 




Roman Coin Struck to Commemo- 
rate THE Victory ovb^r Pyrrhus 
AND His Elephants. 



occasions would they make their way into the fortified town, 
which was the centre at once of their religion and their govern- 
ment. Here were the temples of the gods, the houses of the 
wealthy, and the shops of the 
artizans and traders, where 
corn, oil, or wine could be 
bartered in small quantities 
for salt or rough tools and 
weapons of iron." ^ 

This community followed 
the usual tradition of a di- 
vision into aristocratic and 
common citizens, who were 
called in Rome patricians 
and plebeians. These were the citizens ; the slave or out- 
lander had no more part in the state than he had in Greece. 
But the constitution differed from any Greek constitution in the 
fact that a great part of the ruling power was gathered into 
the hands of a body called the Senate, which was neither purely 
a body of hereditary members nor directly an elected and rep- 
resentative one. It was a nominated one, and in the earlier 
period it was nominated solely from among the patricians. It 
existed before the expulsion of the kings, and in the time of the 
kings it was the king who nominated the senators. But after 
the expulsion of the kings (510 b.c), the supreme government 
was vested in the hands of two elected rulers, the consuls; and 
it was the consuls who took over the business of appointing 
senators. In the early days of the Republic only patricians 
were eligible as consuls or senators, and the share of the plebeians 
in the government consisted merely in a right to vote for the 
consuls and other public officials. Even for that purpose their 
votes did not have the same value as those of their patrician 
fellow citizens. But their votes had at any rate sufficient 
weight to induce many of the patrician candidates to profess 
a more or less sincere concern for plebeian grievances. In the 
early phases of the Roman state, moreover, the plebeians were 
not only excluded from public office, but from intermarriage 
with the patrician class. The administration was evidently 
primarily a patrician affair. 

* Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome. 



390 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The early phase of Eoman affairs was therefore an aristocracy 
of a very pronounced type, and the internal history of Eome 
for the two centuries and a half between the expulsion of the 
last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, and the beginning of 
the first Punic War (264 b.c), was very largely a struggle for 
mastery between those two orders, the patricians and the plebe^ 
ians. It was, in fact, closely parallel with the struggle of 
aristocracy and democracy in the city states of Greece, and, 
as in the case of Greece, there were whole classes in the com- 
munity, slaves, freed slaves, unpropertied free men, outlanders, 
and the like, who were entirely outside and beneath 
the struggle. We have already noted the essential differ- 
ence of Greek democracy and what is called democracy in 
the world to-day. Another misused word is the Roman term 
proletariat, which in modern jargon means all the unpropertied 
people in a modern state. In Rome the proletarii were a vot- 
ing division of fully qualified citizens whose property was less 
than 10,000 copper asses (=£275). They were an enrolled 
class ; their value to the state consisted in their raising families 
of citizens (proles = offspring), and from their ranks were 
drawn the colonists who went to form new Latin cities or to 
garrison important points. But the proletarii were quite dis- 
tinct in origin from slaves or freedmen or the miscellaneous 
driftage of a town slum, and it is a great pity that modern po- 
litical discussion should be confused by an inaccurate use of a 
term which has no exact modern equivalent and which expresses 
nothing real in modern social classification. 

The mass of the details of this struggle between patricians 
and plebeians we can afford to ignore in this outline. It was 
a struggle which showed the Romans to be a people of a 
curiously shrewd character, never forcing things to a destruc- 
tive crisis, but being within the limits of their discretion grasp- 
ing hard dealers. The patricians made a mean use of their 
political advantages to grow rich through the national conquests 
at the expense not only of the defeated enemy, but of the poorer 
plebeian, whose farm had been neglected and who had faWen 
into debt during his military service. The plebeians were ousted 
from any share in the conquered lands, which the patricians 
divided up among themselves. The introduction of money 
probably increased the facilities of the usurer and the difficulties 
of the borrowing debtor. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 



391 



1^/C<^rrurtr 

Th& plebeiaTL aod of 




[From, a "Roman 
bronze!] 



Three sorts of pressure won the plebeians a greater share in 
the government of the country and the good things that were 
coming to Eome as she grew powerful. The first of these (1) 
was the general strike of plebeians. Twice they actually 
marched right out of Rome, threatening to make a new city 
higher up the Tiber, and 
twice this threat proved con- 
clusive. The second method 
of pressure (2) was the threat 
of a tyranny. Just as in 
Attica (the little state of 
which Athens was the capi- 
tal), Peisistratus raised him- 
self to power on the support 
of the poorer districts, so 
there was to be found in most 
periods of plebeian discontent 
some ambitious man ready to 
figure as a leader and wrest 
power from the Senate. For 
a long time the Roman patri- 
cians were clever enough to 

beat every such potential tyrant by giving in to a certain extent 
to the plebeians. And finally (3) there were patricians big- 
minded and far-seeing enough to insist upon the need of 
reconciliation with the plebeians. 

Thus in 509 b.c, Valerius Poplicola (3), the consul, enacted 
that whenever the life or rights of any citizen were at stake, 
there should be an appeal from the magistrates to the general 
assembly. This Lex Valeria was "the Habeas Corpus of 
Rome," and it freed the Roman plebeians from the worst dan- 
gers of class vindictiveness in the law courts. 

In 494 B.C. occurred a strike (1). ''After the Latin war the 
pressure of debt had become excessive, and the plebeians saw 
with indignation their friends, who had often served the state 
bravely in the legions, thrown into chains and reduced to 
slavery at the demand of patrician creditors. War was raging 
against the Volscians; but the legionaries, on their victorious 
return, refused any longer to obey the consuls, and marched, 
though without any disorder, to the Sacred Mount beyond the 
Anio (up the Tiber). There they prepared to found a new city, 



S92 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

since the rights of citizens were denied to them in the old one. 
The patricians were compelled to give way, and the plebeians, 
returning to Rome from the ''First Secession," received the privi- 
lege of having officers of their own, tribunes and aediles." ^ 

In 486 B.C. arose Spurius Cassius (2), a consul who carried 
an Agrarian Law securing public land for the plebeians. But 
the next year he was accused of aiming at royal power, and 
condemned to death. His law never came into operation. 

There followed a long struggle on the part of the plebeians 
to have the laws of Rome written down, so that they would 
no longer have to trust to patrician memories. In 451-450 B.C. 
the law of the Twelve Tables was published, the basis of all 
Roman law. 

But in order that the Twelve Tables should be formulated, 
a committee of ten (the decemvirate) was appointed in the 
place of the ordinary magistrates. A second decemvirate, ap- 
pointed in succession to the first, attempted a sort of aristocratic 
counter-revolution under Appius Claudius. The plebeians 
withdrew again a second time to the Sacred Mount, and Appius 
Claudius committed suicide in prison. 

In 440 came a famine, and a second attempt to found a p>op- 
ular tyranny upon the popular wrongs, by Spurius Maelius, a 
wealthy plebeian, which ended in his assassination. 

After the sack of Rome by the Gauls (390 b.c), Marcus 
Manlius, who had been in command of the Capitol when the 
geese had saved it, came forward as a popular leader. The 
plebeians were suffering severely from the after-war usury and 
profiteering of the patricians, and were incurring heavy debts 
in rebuilding and restocking their farms. Manlius spent his 
fortune in releasing debtors. He was accused by the patricians 
of tyrannous intentions, condemned, and suffered the fate of 
condemned traitors in Rome, being flung from the Tarpeian 
Rock, the precipitous edge of that same Capitoline Hill he 
had defended. 

In 376 B.C., Licinius, who was one of the ten tribunes for 
the people, began a long struggle with the patricians by making 
certain proposals called the Licinian Rogations, that there 
should be a limit to the amount of public land taken by any 
single citizen, so leaving some for everybody, that outstanding 
* J. Wells, Short History of Rome to the Death of Augustus. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 393 

debts should be forgiven without interest upon the repayment 
of the principal, and that henceforth one at least of the two con- 
suls should be a plebeian. This precipitated a ten-year strug- 
gle. The plebeian power to stop business by the veto of their 
representatives, the tribunes, was fully exercised. In cases of 
national extremity it was the custom to set all other magistrates 
aside and appoint one leader, the Dictator. Eome had done 
such a thing during times of military necessity before, but now 
the patricians set up a Dictator in a time of profound peace, 
with the idea of crushing Licinius altogether. They appointed 
Camillus, who had besieged and taken Veii from the Etruscans. 
But Camillus was a wiser man than his supporters ; he brought 
about a compromise between the two orders in which most of 
the demands of the plebeians were conceded (366 B.C.), dedi- 
cated a temple to Concord, and resigned his power. 

Thereafter the struggle between the orders abated. It abated 
because, among other influences, the social differences between 
patricians and plebeians were diminishing. Trade was coming 
to Eome with increasing political power, and many plebeians 
were growing rich and many patricians becoming relatively 
poor. Intermarriage had been rendered possible by a change 
in the law, and social intermixture was going on. While the 
rich plebeians were becoming, if not aristocratic, at least oligar- 
chic in habits and sympathy, new classes were springing up 
in Rome with fresh interests and no political standing. Par- 
ticularly abundant were the freedmen, slaves set free, for the 
most part artisans, but some of them traders, who were grow- 
ing wealthy. And the Senate, no longer a purely patrician 
body — since various official positions were now open to plebe- 
ians, and such plebeian officials became senators — was becoming 
now an assembly of all the wealthy, able, energetic, and influen- 
tial men in the state. The Roman power was expanding, and 
as it expanded these old class oppositions of the early Latin 
community were becoming unmeaning. They were being re- 
placed by new associations and new antagonisms. Rich men 
of all origins were being drawn together into a common interest 
against the communistic ideas of the poor. 

In 390 B.C. Rome was a miserable little city on the borders 
of Etruria, being sacked by the Gauls ; in 275 B.C. she was ruling 
and unifying all Italy, from the Arno to the Straits of Mes- 



394. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

sina. The compromise of Camillus (3G7 B.C.) had put an end 
to internal dissensions, and left her energies free for expansion. 
And the same queer combination of sagacity and aggressive 
selfishness that had distinguished the war of her orders at home 
and enabled her population to worry out a balance of power 
without any catastrophe, marks her policy abroad. She under- 
stood the value of allies; she could assimilate; abroad as at 
home she could in those days at least "give and take" with a 
certain fairness and sanity. There lay the peculiar power of 
Rome. By that it was she succeeded where Athens, for example, 
had conspicuously failed. 

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrow- 
ness of "patriotism," which is the ruin of all nations. Athens 
was disliked and envied by her own empire because she domi- 
nated it in a spirit of civic egotism ; her disasters were not felt 
and shared as disasters by her subject-cities. The shrewder, 
nobler Roman senators of the great years of Rome, before 
the first Punic War overstrained her moral strength and began 
her degeneration, were not only willing in the last resort to 
share their privileges with the mass of their own people, but 
eager to incorporate their sturdiest antagonists upon terms of 
equality with themselves. They extended their citizenship 
cautiously but steadily. Some cities became Roman, with even 
a voting share in the government. Others had self-government 
and the right to trade or marry in Rome, without full Roman 
citizenship. Garrisons of full citizens were set up at strategic 
points, and colonies with variable privileges established amidst 
the purely conquered peoples. The need to keep communica- 
tions open in this great and growing mass of citizenship was 
evident from the first. Printing and paper were not yet avail- 
able for intercourse, but a system of high roads followed the 
Latin speech and the Roman rule. The first of these, the Appian 
Way, ran from Rome ultimately into the heel of Italy. It was 
begun by the censor Appius Claudius (who must not be con- 
fused with the decemvir Appius Claudius of a century earlier) 
in 312 B.C. 

According to a census made in 265 b.c, there were already in 
the Roman dominions, that is to say in Italy south of the Arno, 
300,000 citizens. They all had a common interest in the wel- 
fare of the state ; they were all touched a little with the diffused 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 395 

kingship of the republic. This was, we have to note, an abso- 
lutely new thing in the history of mankind. All considerable 
states and kingdoms and empires hitherto had been communities 
by mere obedience to some head, some monarch, upon whoso 
moods and character the public welfare was helplessly depend- 
ent. No republic had hitherto succeeded in being anything more 
than a city state. The so-called Athenian ''empire" was simply 
a city state directing its allies and its subjugated cities. In a 
few decades the Roman republic was destined to extend its 
citizenship into the valley of the Po, to assimilate the kindred 
Gauls, replacing their langiiage by Latin, and to set up a Latin 
city, Aquileia, at the very head of the Adriatic Sea. In 89 b.c. 
all free inhabitants of Italy became Roman citizens ; in 212 a.d. 
the citizenship was extended to all free men in the empire. 

This extraordinary political growth was manifestly the pre- 
cursor of all modern states of the western type. It is as inter- 
esting to the political student, therefore, as a carboniferous 
amphibian or an archceopteryx to the student of zoological de- 
velopment. It is the primitive type of the now dominant order. 
Its experiences throw light upon all subsequent political history. 

One natural result of this growth of a democracy of hun- 
dreds of thousands of citizens scattered over the greater part of 
Italy was the growth in power of the Senate. There had been 
in the development of the Roman constitution a variety of 
forms of the popular assembly, the plebeian assembly, the 
assembly by tribes, the assembly by centuries, and the like, into 
which variety we cannot enter here with any fullness ; but the 
idea was established that with the popular assembly lay the 
power of initiating laws. It is to be noted that there was a sort 
of parallel government in this system. The assembly by tribes 
or by centuries was an assembly of the whole citizen, body, 
patrician and plebeian together; the assembly of the plebeians 
was of course an assembly only of the plebeian class. Each as- 
sembly had its own officials ; the former, the consuls, etc. ; the 
latter, the tribunes. While Rome was a little state, twenty 
miles square, it was possible to assemble something like a repre- 
sentative gathering of the people, but it will be manifest that 
with the means of communication existing in Italy at that time, 
it was now impossible for the great bulk of the citizens even 
to keep themselves informed of what was going on at Rome, 



396 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

much less to take any effective part in political life there. 
Aristotle in his Politics had already pointed out the virtual 
disenfranchisement of voters who lived out of the city and were 
preoccupied with agi'icultural pursuits, and this sort of disen- 
franchisement by mechanical difficulties applied to the vast 
majority of Roman citizens. With the growth of Rome an 
unanticipated weakness crept into political life through these 
causes, and the popular assembly became more and more a 
gathering of political hacks and the city riffraff, and less and 
less a representation of the ordinary worthy citizens. The 
popular assembly came nearest to power and dignity in the 
fourth century b.c. From that period it steadily declined in 
influence, and the new Senate, which was no longer a patrician 
body, with a homogeneous and on the whole a noble tradition, 
but a body of rich men, ex-magistrates, powerful officials, bold 
adventurers and the like, pervaded by a strong disposition to 
return to the idea of hereditary qualification, became for three 
centuries the ruling power in the Roman world. 

There are two devices since known to the world which might 
have enabled the popular government of Rome to go on de- 
veloping beyond its climax in the days of Appius Claudius the 
Censor, at the close of the fourth century b.c, but neither of 
them occurred to the Roman mind. The first of these devices 
was a proper use of print. In our account of early Alexandria 
we have already remarked upon the strange fact that printed 
books did not come into the world in the fourth or third cen- 
tury B.C. This account of Roman affairs forces us to repeat 
that remark. To the modern mind it is clear that a widespread 
popular government demands, as a necessary condition for 
health, a steady supply of correct information upon public 
affairs to all the citizens and a maintenance of interest. The 
popular governments in the modern states that have sprung 
up on either side of the Atlantic during the last two centuries 
have been possible only through the more or less honest and 
thorough ventilation of public affairs through the press. But 
in Italy the only way in which the government at Rome could 
communicate with any body of its citizens elsewhere was by 
sending a herald, and with the individual citizen it could hold 
no communication by any means at all. 

The second device, for which the English are chiefly respon- 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS S97 

sible in the history of mankind, which the Komans never used, 
was the almost equally obvious one of representative govern- 
ment. For the old Popular Assembly (in its threefold form) it 
would have been possible to have substituted a gathering of 
delegates. Later on in history, the English did, as the state 
gTew, realize this necessity. Certain men, the Knights of the 
Shire, were called up to Westminster to speak and vote for 
local feeling, and were more or less formally elected for that 
end. The Eoman situation seems to a modern mind to have 
called aloud for such a modification. It was never made. 

The method of assembling the comitia tributa (one of the 
three main forms of the Popular Assembly) was by the proc- 
lamation of a herald, who was necessarily inaudible to most of 
Italy, seventeen days before the date of the gathering. The 
aug-urs, the priests of divination whom Rome had inherited from 
the Etruscans, examined the entrails of sacrificial beasts on the 
night before the actual assembly, and if they thought fit to say 
that these gory portents were unfavourable, the comitia tributa 
dispersed. But if the augurs reported that the livers were 
propitious, there was a great blowing of horns from the Capitol 
and from the walls of the city, and the assembly went on. It 
was held in the open air, either in the little Forum beneath the 
Capitol or in a still smaller recess opening out of the Forum, 
or in the military exercising ground, the Campus Martins, now 
the most crowded part of modern Rome, but then an open space. 
Business began at dawn with prayer. There were no seats, 
and this probably helped to reconcile the citizen to the rule that 
everything ended at sunset. 

After the opening prayer came a discussion of the measures 
to be considered by the assembly, and the proposals before the 
meeting were read out. Is it not astonishing that there were no 
printed copies distributed ? If any copies were handed about, 
they must have been in manuscript, and each copy must have 
been liable to errors and deliberate falsification. No questions 
seem to have been allowed, but private individuals might ad- 
dress the gathering with the permission of the presiding magis- 
trate. 

The multitude then proceeded to go into enclosures like cattle- 
pens according to their tribes, and each tribe voted upon the 
measure under consideration. The decision was then taken 



S98 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

not by the majority of the citizens, but by the majority of tribes, 
and it was announced by the heralds. 

The Popular Assembly by centuries, comitia centuriatd, was 
very similar in its character, except that instead of thirty-five 
tribes there were, in the third century B.C., 373 centuries, and 
there was a sacrifice as well as prayer to begin with. The cen- 
turies, originally military (like the "hundreds" of primitive 
English local govenmient), had long since lost any connection 
with the number one hundred. Some contained only a few 
people; some very many. There were eighteen centuries of 
knights (equites), who were originally men in a position to 
maintain a horse and serve in the cavalry, though later the 
Eoman knighthood, like knighthood in England, became a vul- 
gar distinction of no military, mental, or moral significance. 
(These equites became a very important class as Rome traded 
and grew rich ; for a time they were the real moving class in the 
community. There was as little chivalry left among them at 
last as there is in the "honours list" knights of England of 
to-day. The senators from about 200 B.C. were excluded from 
trade. The equites became, therefore, the great business men, 
negotiatores, and as puhlicani they farmed the taxes.) There 
were, in addition, eighty ( !) centuries of wealthy men (worth 
over 100,000 asses), tw^enty-two of men worth over 75,000 asses, 
and so on. There were two centuries each of mechanics and 
musicians, and the proletarii made up one century. The deci- 
sion in the comitia centuriata was by the majority of centuries. 

Is it any wonder that with the growth of the Roman state 
and the complication of its business, power shifted back from 
such a Popular Assembly to the Senate, which was a compara- 
tively compact body varying between three hundred as a mini- 
mum, and, at the utmost, nine hundred members (to which 
it was raised by Caesar), men who had to do with affairs and 
big business, who knew each other more or less, and had a 
tradition of government and policy ? The power of nominating 
and calling up the senators vested in the Republic first with the 
consuls, and when, some time after, "censors" were created, and 
many of the powers of the consuls had been transferred to 
them, they were also given this power. Appius Claudius, one 
of the first of the censors to exercise it, enrolled freedmen in 
the tribes and called sons of freedmen to the Senate. But this 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS S99 

was a shocking arrangement to the consei-vative instincts of the 
time; the consuls would not recognize his Senate, and the next 
censors (304 b.c.) set aside his invitations. His attempt, how- 
ever, serves to show how far the Senate had progressed from 
its original condition as a purely patrician hodj. Like the con- 
temporary British House of Lords, it had become a gathering 
of big business men, energetic politicians, successful adven- 
turers, great landowners, and the like; its patrician dignity was 
a picturesque sham ; but, unlike the British House of Lords, 
it was unchecked legally by anything but the inefficient Popular 
Assembly we have already described, and by the tribunes elected 
by the plebeian assembly. Its legal control over the consuls 
and proconsuls was not great ; it had little executive power ; 
but in its prestige and experience lay its strength and influence. 
The interests of its members were naturally antagonistic to 
the interests of the general body of citizens, but for some genera- 
tions that great mass of ordinary men was impotent to express 
its dissent from the proceedings of this oligarchy. Direct pop- 
ular government of a state larger than a city state had already 
failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there was no public 
education, no press, and no representative system ; it had failed 
through these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first Punic 
War. But its appearance is of enormous interest, as the first 
appearance of a set of problems with which the whole political 
intelligence of the world wrestles at the present time. 

The Senate met usually in a Senate House in the Forum, 
but on special occasions it would be called to meet in this or 
that temple ; and when it had to deal with foreign ambassadors 
or its own generals (who were not allowed to enter the city 
while in command of troops), it assembled in the Campus 
Martins outside the walls. 

§ 3 

It has been necessary to deal rather fully with the political 
structure of the Roman republic because of its immense im- 
portance to this day. The constitution of Carthage need not 
detain us long. 

Italy under Rome was a republican country; Carthage was 
that much older thing, a republican city. She had an "em- 
pire," as Athens had an ''empire," of tributary states which 



400 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



did not love her, and she had a great and naturally disloyal 
industrial slave population. 

In the city there were two elected ''kings," as Aristotle calls 
them, the mffetes, who were really equivalent to the Koman 

censors ; their Sem- 
~ itic name was the 

same as that used 
for the Jewish 
judges. There was 
an impotent public 
assembly and a sen- 
ate of leading per- 
sonages ; but two 
committees of this 
senate, nominally 
elected, but elected 
by easily controlled 
methods, the Hun- 
dred and Four and 
the Thirty, really 
constituted a close 
oligarchy of the rich- 
est and most influen- 
tial men. They told as little as they could to their allies and 
fellow citizens, and consulted them as little as possible. They 
pursued schemes in which the welfare of Carthage was no 
doubt subordinated to the advantage of their own group. They 
were hostile to new men or novel measures, and confident that 
a sea ascendancy that had lasted two centuries must be in the 
very nature of things. 

§ 4 

It would be interesting, and not altogether idle, to speculate 
what might have happened to mankind if Kome and Carthage 
could have settled their differences and made a permanent 
alliance in the Western world. If Alexander the Great had 
lived, he might have come westward and driven these two pow- 
ers into such a fusion of interests. But that would not have 
suited the private schemes and splendours of the Carthaginian 
oligarchy, and the new Senate of greater Eome was now grow- 
ing fond of the taste of plunder and casting covetous eyes across 




muut cotnS' 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 401 

the Straits of Messina upon the Carthaginian possessions in 
Sicily. They were covetous, but they were afraid of the 
Carthaginian sea-power. Roman popuhir ''patriotism," how- 
ever, was also jealous and fearful of these Carthaginians, and 
less inclined to count the cost of a conflict. The alliance 
Pyrrhus had forced upon Rome and Carthage held good for 
eleven years, but Rome was ripe for what is called in modern 
political jargon an "offensive defensive" war. The occasion 
arose in 264 b.c. 

At that time Sicily was not completely in Carthaginian hands. 
The eastward end was still under the power of the Greek king 
of Syracuse, Hiero, a successor of that Dionysius to whom 
Plato had gone as resident court philosopher. A band of 
mercenaries who had been in the service of Syracuse seized 
upon Messina (289 b.c), and raided the trade of Syracuse so 
that at last Hiero was forced to take measures to suppress them 
(270 B.C.). Thereupon Carthage, which was also vitally con- 
cerned in the suppression of piracy, came to his aid, and put 
in a Carthaginian garrison at Messina. This was an alto- 
gether justifiable proceeding. 'Now that Tyre had been de- 
stroyed, the only capable gaiardian of sea law in the Mediter- 
ranean was Carthage, and the suppression of piracy was her 
task by habit and tradition. 

The pirates of Messina appealed to Rome, and the accumu- 
lating jealousy and fear of Carthage decided the Roman people 
to help them. An expedition was dispatched to Messina under 
the consul Appius Claudius (the third Appius Claudius we 
have had to mention in this history). 

So began the first of the most wasteful and disastrous series 
of wars that has ever darkened the history of mankind. But 
this is how one historian, soaked with the fantastic political 
ideas of our times, is pleased to write of this evil expedition. 
"The Romans knew they were entering on war with Carthage ; 
but the political instincts of the people were right, for a Car- 
thaginian garrison on the Sicilian Straits would have been a 
dangerous menace to the peace of Italy." So they protected 
the peace of Italy from this "menace" by a war that lasted 
nearly a quarter of a century. They wrecked their own slowly 
acquired political moral in the process. 

The Romans captured Messina, and Hiero deserted from 
the Carthaginians to the Romans. Then for some time the 



402 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

struggle centred upon the town Agrigentum. This the Romans 
besieged, and a period of trench warfare ensued. Both sides 
suffered greatly from plagiie and irregiilar supplies; the 
Eomans lost 30,000 men; but in the end (261 b.c.) the Car- 
thaginians evacuated the place and retired to their fortified 
towns on the western coast of the island of which Lilybaeum 
was the chief. These they could supply easily from the African 
mainland, and, as long as their sea ascendancy held, they could 
exhaust any Eoman effort against them. 

And now a new and very extraordinary phase of the war 
began. The Romans came out upon the sea, and to the aston- 
ishment of the Carthaginians and themselves defeated the 
Carthaginian fleet. Since the days of Salamis there had been 
a considerable development of naval architecture. Then the 
ruling type of battleship was a trireme, a galley with three 
banks (rows) of oars; now the leading Carthaginian battleship 
was a quinquereme, a much bigger galley with five banks of 
oars, which could ram or shear the oars of any feebler vessel. 
The Romans had come into the war with no such shipping. Now 
they set to work to build quinqueremes, being helped, it is said, 
in their designing by one of these Carthaginian vessels coming 
ashore. In two months they built a hundred quinqueremes and 
thirty triremes. But they had no skilled navigators, no experi- 
enced oarsmen, and these deficiencies they remedied partly 
with the assistance of their Greek allies and partly by the in- 
vention of new tactics. Instead of relying upon ramming or 
breaking the oars of the adversary, which demanded more sea- 
manship than they possessed, they decided to board the enemy, 
and they constructed a sort of long draw-bridge on their ships, 
held up to a mast by a pulley and with grappling-hooks and 
spikes at the end. They also loaded their galleys with soldiers. 
Then as the Carthaginian rammed or swept alongside, this 
corvus, as it was called, could be let down and the boarders 
could swarm aboard him. 

Simple as this device was, it proved a complete success. It 
changed the course of the war and the fate of the world. The 
small amount of invention needed to counteract the corvus 
was not apparently within the compass of the Carthaginian 
rulers. At the battle of Myla? (260 b.c.) the Romans gained 
their first naval victory and captured or destroyed fifty vessels. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 403 

At the great battle of Ecnomus (256 b.c), "probably the 
greatest naval engagement of antiquity," ^ in which seven or 
eight hundred big ships were engaged, the Carthaginians 
showed that they had learnt nothing from their former dis- 
aster. According to rule they outmanoeuvred and defeated the 
Komans, but the corvus again defeated them. The Romans 
sank thirty vessels and captured sixty-four. 

Thereafter the war continued with violent fluctuations of 
fortune, but with a continuous demonstration of the greater 
energy, solidarity, and initiative of the Eomans. After 
Ecnomus the Romans invaded Africa by sea, and sent an in- 
sufficiently supported army, which after many successes and 
the capture of Tunis (within ten miles of Carthage) was com- 
pletely defeated. They lost their sea ascendancy through a 
storm, and regained it by building a second fleet of two hun- 
dred and twenty ships within three months. They captured 
Palermo, and defeated a great Carthaginian army there (251 
B.C.), capturing one hundred and four elephants, and making 
such a triumphal procession into Rome as that city had never 
seen before. They made an unsuccessful siege of Lilybseum, 
the chief surviving Carthaginian stronghold in Sicily. They 
lost their second fleet in a great naval battle at Drepanum (249 
B.C.), losing one hundred and eighty out of two hundred and 
ten vessels ; and a third fleet of one hundred and twenty battle- 
ships and eight hundred transports was lost in the same year 
partly in battle and partly in a storm. 

For seven years a sort of war went on between the nearly 
exhausted combatants, a war of raids and feeble sieges, during 
which the Carthaginians had the best of it at sea. Then by a 
last supreme effort Rome launched a fourth fleet of two hun- 
dred keels, and defeated the last strength of the Carthaginians 
at the battle of the ^Egatian Isles (241 B.C.), after which Car- 
thage (240 B.C.) sued for peace. 

By the terms of this peace, all Sicily, except for the do- 
minions of Hiero of Syracuse, became an "estate" of the Roman 
people. There was no such process of assimilation as had been 
practised in Italy ; Sicily became a conquered province, paying 
tribute and yielding profit like the provinces of the older em- 
pires. And, in addition, Carthage paid a war indemnity of 
3,200 talents (=£788,000). 

' J. Wells, op, cit. 



404 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




Homaa^ Cbnwis*. 4*Cetifc.B.e. HalT^UeO 



Por twenty-two years there was peace between Rome and 
Carthage. It was peace without prosperity. Both combatants 
were suffering from the want and disorganization that follow 
naturally and necessarily upon all great wars. The territories 
of Carthage seethed with violent disorder; the returning sol- 
diers could not get their pay, and mutinied and looted; the 
land went uncultivated. We read of horrible cruelties in the 
suppression of these troubles by Hamilcar, the Carthaginian 

general; of men 
being crucified 
by the thousand. 
Sardinia and 
Corsica revolted. 
The "peace of 
Italy" was 
scarcely happier. 
The Gauls rose 
and marched 
south; they were 
defeated, and 
40,000 of them 
killed at Telamon. It is manifest that Italy was incomplete 
until it reached the Alps. Roman colonies were planted in 
the valley of the Po, and the great northward artery, the Via 
Flaminia, was begun. But it shows the moral and intellectual 
degradation of this post-war period that when the Gauls were 
threatening Rome, human sacrifices were proposed and carried 
out. The old Carthaginian sea law was broken up — it may 
have been selfish and monopolistic, but it was at least orderly 
— the Adriatic swarmed with Illyrian pirates, and as the result 
of a quarrel arising out of this state of affairs, Illyria, after 
two wars, had to be annexed as a second "province." By send- 
ing expeditions to annex Sardinia and Corsica, which were 
Carthaginian provinces in revolt, the Romans prepared the way 
for the Second Punic War. 

The First Punic War had tested and demonstrated the rela- 
tive strength of Rome and Carthage. With a little more wis- 
dom on either side, with a little more magnanimity on the part 
of Rome, there need never have been a renewal of the struggle, 
^ut Rome was an ungracious conqueror. She seized Corsica 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 405 

and Sardinia on no just grounds, slie increased the indemnity 
by 1,200 talents, she set a limit, the Ebro, to Carthaginian de- 
velopments in Spain. There was a strong party in Carthage, 
led by Hanno, for the propitiation of Rome ; but it was natural 
that many Carthaginians should come to regard their national 
adversary with a despairing hatred. 

Hatred is one of the passions that can master a life, and 
there is a type of temperament very prone to it, ready to see 
life in terms of vindictive melodrama, ready to find stimulus 
and satisfaction in frightful demonstrations of "justice" and 
revenge. The fears and jealousies of the squatting-place and 
the cave still bear their dark blossoms in our lives ; we are not 
four hundred generations yet from the old Stone Age. Great 
wars, as all Europe knows, give this "hating" temperament the 
utmost scope, and the greed and pride and cnielty that the First 
Punic War had released were now producing a rich crop of 
anti-foreign monomania. The outstanding figure upon the 
side of Carthage was a great general and administrator, Hamil- 
car Barca, who now set himself to circumvent and shatter 
Rome. He was the father-in-law of Hasdrubal and the father 
of a boy Hannibal, destined to be the most dreaded enemy that 
ever scared the Roman Senate. The most obvious course be- 
fore Carthage was the reconstruction of its fleet and naval 
administration, and the recovery of sea power, but this, it 
would seem, Hamilcar could not effect. As an alternative he 
resolved to organize Spain as the base of a land attack upon 
Italy. He went to Spain as governor in 236 e.g., and Hannibal 
related afterwards that his father then — he was a boy of eleven 
— made him vow deathless hostility to the Roman power. 

This quasi-insane concentration of the gifts and lives of the 
Barca family upon revenge is but one instance of the narrow- 
ing and embitterment of life that the stresses and universal 
sense of insecurity of this great struggle produced in the minds 
of men. A quarter of a century of war had left the whole 
western world miserable and harsh. While the eleven-year-old 
Hannibal was taking his vow of undying hatred, there was run- 
ning about a farmhouse of Tusculum a small but probably very 
disagreeable child of two named Marcus Porcius Cato. This 
boy lived to be eighty-five years old, and his ruling passion 
seems to have been hatred for any human happiness but his 
own. He was a good soldier, and had a successful political 



406 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

career. He held a command in Spain, and distinguished him- 
self by his cruelties. He posed as a champion of religion and 
public morality, and under this convenient cloak carried on a 
lifelong war against everything that was young, gracious, or 
pleasant. Whoever roused his jealousy incurred his moral dis- 
approval. He was energetic in the support and administration 
of all laws against dress, against the personal adornment of 
women, against entertainments and free discussion. He was 
so fortunate as to be made censor, which gave him great power 
over the private lives of public people. He was thus able to 
ruin public opponents through private scandals. He expelled 
Manlius from the Senate for giving his wife a kiss in the day- 
time in the sight of their daughter. He persecuted Greek 
literature, about which, until late in life, he was totally igno- 
rant. Then he read and admired Demosthenes. He wrote in 
Latin upon agriculture and the ancient and lost virtues of 
Eome. From these writings much light is thrown upon his 
qualities. One of his maxims was that when a slave was not 
sleeping he should be working. Another was that old oxen 
and slaves should be sold oif. He left the war horse that had 
carried him_ through his Spanish campaigns behind him when 
he returned to Italy in order to save freight. He hated other 
people's gardens, and cut off the supply of water for garden 
use in Eome. After entertaining company, when dinner was 
over he would go out to correct any negligence in the service 
with a leather thong. He admired his own virtues very greatly, 
and insisted upon them in his writings. There was a battle at 
Thermopylae against Antiochus the Great, of which he wrote, 
''those who saw him charging the enemy, routing and pursuing 
them, declared that Cato owed less to the people of Rome, than 
the people of Rome owed to Cato." ^ In his old age Cato be- 
came lascivious and misconducted himself with a woman slave. 
Finally, when his son protested against this disorder of their 
joint household, he married a young wife, the daughter of 
his secretary, who was not in a position to refuse his offer. 
(What became of the woman slave is not told. Probably he 
sold her.) This compendium of all the old Roman virtues 
died at an advanced age, respected and feared. Almost his 
last public act was to urge on the Third Punic War and the 
final destruction of Carthage. He had gone to Carthage as a 

^Plutarch, Life of Cato. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 407 

commissioner to settle certain differences between Carthage 
and Numidia, and he had been shocked and horrified to find 
some evidences of prosperity and even of happiness in that 
country. 

From the time of that visit onward Cato concluded every 
speech he made in the Senate by croaking out "Delenda est 
Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed"). 

Such was the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome 
during the Punic struggle, such was the protagonist of Hanni- 
bal and the Carthaginian revanche, and by him and by Hannibal 
we may judge the tone and quality of the age. 

The two great western powers, and Eome perhaps more 
than Carthage, were strained mentally and morally by the 
stresses of the First War. The evil side of life was uppermost. 
The histoiy of the Second and Third Punic Wars (219 to 201 
and 149 to 146 B.C.), it is plain, is not the history of perfectly 
sane peoples. It is nonsense for historians to write of the 
"political instincts" of the Romans or Carthaginians. Quite 
other instincts were loose. The red eyes of the ancestral ape 
had come back into the world. It was a time when reasonable 
men were howled down or murdered ; the true spirit of the 
age is shown in the eager examination for signs and portents 
of the still quivering livers of those human victims who were 
sacrificed in Rome during the panic before the battle of Tela- 
mon. The western world w^as indeed black with homicidal 
monomania. Two great peoples, both very necessary to the 
world's development, fell foul of one another, and at last Rome 
succeeded in murderine; Carthage. 



§ 6 

We can only tell very briefly here of the particulars of the 
Second and Third Punic Wars. We have told how Hamilcar 
began to organize Spain, and how the Romans forbade him 
to cross the Ebro. He died in 228 e.g., and was followed by 
his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who was assassinated in 221 b.c. and 
succeeded by Hannibal, who w^as now twenty-six. The actual 
war was precipitated by the Romans making a breach of their 
own regulations, and interfering with affairs south of the Ebro. 
Whereupon Hannibal marched straight through the south of 
Gaul, and crossed the Alps (218 b.c.) into Italy. 



408 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The history of the next fifteen years is the story of the most 
brilliant and futile raid in history. For fifteen years Hannibal 
held out in Italy, victorious and unconquered. The Roman 
generals were no match for the Carthaginian, and whenever 
they met him they were beaten. But one Eoman general, P. 
Cornelius Scipio, had the strategic sense to take a course that 
robbed all Hannibal's victories of fruit. At the outbreak of 
the war he had been sent by sea to Marseilles to intercept 
Hannibal ; he arrived three days late, and, instead of pursuing 
him, he sent on his army into Spain to cut up Hannibal's sup- 
plies and reinforcements. Throughout all the subsequent war 
there remained this Roman army of Spain between Hannibal 
and his base. He was left ''in the air," incapable of conducting 
sieges or establishing conquests. 

Whenever he met the Romans in open fight he beat them. 
He gained two great victories in North Italy, and won over 
the Gauls to his side. He pressed south into Etruria, and am- 
bushed, surrounded, and completely destroyed a Roman anny 
at Lake Trasimene. In 216 b.c. he was assailed by a vastly 
superior Roman force under Varro at Cannse, and destroyed 
it utterly. Fifty thousand men are said to have been killed 
and ten thousand prisoners taken. He was, however, unable to 
push on and capture Rome because he had no siege equipment. 

But Cannas produced other fruits. A large part of Southern 
Italy came over to Hannibal, including Capua, the city next 
in size to Rome, and the Macedonians allied themselves with 
him. Moreover, Hiero of Syracuse, the faithful ally of Rome, 
was now dead, and his successor Hieronymus turned over to 
the Carthaginians. The Romans carried on the war, however, 
with great toughness and resolution ; they refused to treat with 
Hannibal after Cannae, they pressed a slow but finally suc- 
cessful blockade and siege of Capua, and a Roman army set 
itself to reduce Syracuse. The siege of Syracuse is chiefly 
memorable for the brilliant inventions of the philosopher Archi- 
medes, which long held the Romans at bay. We have already 
named this Archimedes as one of the pupils and correspondents 
of the school of the Alexandrian Museum. He was killed 
in the final storm of the town. Tarentum (209 B.C.), Hanni- 
bal's chief port and means of supply from Carthage, at last fol- 
lowed Syracuse (212 b.c.) and Capua (211 B.C.), and his com- 
munications became irregular. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 409 

Spain also was wrested bit by bit from the Carthaginian 
grip. When at last reinforcements for Hannibal under his 
brother Hasdrnbal (not to be confused with his brother-in- 
law of the same name who was assassinated) struggled through 
into Italy, they were destroyed at the battle of the Metaurus 
(207 B.C.), and the first news that came to Hannibal of the 
disaster was the hacked-off head of his brother thrown into his 
camp. 

Thereafter Hannibal was blockaded into Calabria, the heel 
of Italy. He had no forces for further operations of any magni- 
tude, and he returned at last to Carthage in time to command 
the Carthaginians in the last battle of the war. 

This last battle, the battle of Zama (202 b.c), was fought 
close to Carthage. 

It was the first defeat Hannibal experienced and so it is 
well to give a little attention to the personality of his con- 
queror, Scipio Africanus the Elder, who stands out in history 
as a very fine gentleman indeed, a great soldier and a generous 
man. We have already mentioned a certain P. Cornelius Scipio 
who struck at Hannibal's base in Spain ; this was his son ; until 
after Zama this son bore the same name of P. Cornelius Scipio, 
and then the surname of Africanus was given him. (The 
younger Scipio Africanus, Scipio Africanus Minor, who was 
later to end the Third Punic War, was the adopted son of the 
son of this first Scipio Africanus the Elder.) Scipio Africanus 
was everything that aroused the distrust, hatred, and opposi- 
tion of old-fashioned Romans of the school of Cato. He was 
young, he was happy and able, he spent money freely, he was 
well versed in Greek literature, and inclined rather to Phrygian 
novelties in religion than to the sterner divinities of Rome. 
And he did not believe in the extreme discretion that then ruled 
Roman strateg}\ 

After the early defeats of the Second Punic W^ar, Roman 
military operations were dominated by the personality of a 
general, Fabius, who raised the necessity of avoiding battle 
with Hannibal into a kind of sacred principle. For ten years 
''Fabian tactics" prevailed in Italy. The Romans blockaded, 
cut up convoys, attacked stragglers, and ran away whenever 
Hannibal appeared. No doubt it was wise for a time after their 
first defeats to do this sort of thing, but the business of the 
stronger power, and Rome was the stronger power throughout 



410 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the Second Punic War, is not to tolerate an interminable war, 
but to repair losses, discover able generals, train better armies, 
and destroy the enemy power. Decision is one of the duties 
of strength. 

To such men as young Scipio, the sly, ineffective artfulness 
of Fabianism, which was causing both Italy and Carthage to 
bleed slowly to death, was detestable. He clamoured for an 
attack upon Carthage itself. 

''But Fabius, on this occasion, filled the city with alarms, 
as if the commonwealth was going to be brought into the most 
extreme danger by a rash and indiscreet young man ; in short, 
he scrupled not to do or say anything he thought likely to dis- 
suade his countrymen from embracing the proposal. With the 
Senate he carried his point. But the people believed that his 
opposition to Scipio proceeded either from envy of his success, 
or from a secret fear that if this young hero should perfonn 
some signal exploit, put an end to the war, or even remove it 
out of Italy, his own slow proceedings through the course of 
so many years might be imputed to indolence or timidity. . . . 
He applied to Crassus, the colleague of Scipio, and endeavoured 
to persuade him not to yield that province to Scipio, but, if 
he thought it proper to conduct the war in that manner, to go 
himself against Carthage. N^ay, he even hindered the raising 
of money for that expedition, so that Scipio was obliged to find 
the supplies as he could. . . . He endeavoured to prevent the 
young men who offered to go as volunteers from giving in their 
names, and loudly declared, both in the Senate and Forum, 
'That Scipio did net only himself avoid Hannibal, but intended 
to carry away with him the remaining strength of Italy, per- 
suading the young men to abandon their parents, their wives, 
and native city, while an unsubdued and potent enemy was 
still at their doors.' With these assertions he so terrified the 
people, that they allowed Scipio to take with him only the 
legions that were in Sicily, and three hundred of those men 
who had served him with so much fidelity in Spain. . . . After 
Scipio was gone over into Africa, an account was soon brought 
to Rome of his glorious and wonderful achievements. This 
account was followed by rich spoils, which confirmed it. A 
Numidian king was taken prisoner; two camps were burned 
and destroyed ; and in them a vast number of men, arms, and 
horses; and the Carthaginians sent orders to Hannibal to quit 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 411 

his fruitless hopes in Italy, and return home to defend his 
own country. Whilst every tongue was applaudino- these ex- 
ploits of Scipio, Fabius proposed that his successor should be 
appointed, without any shadow of reason for it, except what 
this well-known maxim implies: viz., 'That it is dangerous to 
trust affairs of such importance to the fortune of one man, 
because it is not likely that he will be always successful.' . . . 
Nay, even when Hannibal embarked his army and quitted 
Italy, Fabius ceased not to disturb the general joy and to damp 
the spirits of Rome, for he took the liberty to affirm, 'That the 
commonwealth was now come to her last and worst trial ; that 
she had the most reason to dread the efforts of Hannibal when 
he should arrive in Africa, and attack her sons under the walls 
of Carthage ; that Scipio would have to do with an ar^ny yet 
warm with the blood of so many Roman generals, dictators, 
and consuls.' The city was alarmed with these declamations, 
and though the w-ar was removed into Africa, the danger seemed 
to approach nearer Rome than ever." 

Before the battle of Zama there were a brief tmce and 
negotiations, which broke down through the fault of the Car- 
thaginians. As with the battle of Arbela, so the exact day of 
the battle of Zama can be fixed by an eclipse, which in this 
case occurred during the fighting. The Romans had been 
joined by the N^umidians, the hinterland people of Carthage, 
under their king Massinissa, and this gave them — for the first 
time in any battle against Hannibal — a great superiority of 
cavalry. Hannibal's cavalry wings were driven off*, while at 
the same time the sounder discipline of Scipio's infantry en- 
abled them to open lanes for the charge of the Carthaginian 
war elephants without being thrown into confusion. Hannibal 
attempted to extend his infantry line to envelop the Roman in- 
fantry mass, but while at Canna? all the advantage of training 
and therefore of manoeuvring power had been on his side, and 
he had been able to surround and massacre a crowd of infantry, 
he now found against him an infantry line better than his own. 
His own line broke as it extended, the Roman legion charged 
home, and the day was lost. The Roman cavalry came back 
from the pursuit of Hannibal's horse to turn what was already 
a defeat into a disastrous rout. 

Carthage submitted without any further struggle. The 
terms were severe, but they left it possible for her to hope for 



412 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

an honourable future. She had to abandon Spain to Rome, 
to give up all her war fleet except ten vessels, to pay 10,000 
talents (£2,400,000), and, what was the most difficult condi- 
tion of all, to agree not to wage war without the permission of 
Rome. Finally a condition was added that Hannibal, as the 
great enemy of Rome, should be surrendered. But he saved his 
countrymen from this humiliation by flying to Asia. 

These were exorbitant conditions, with which Rome should 
have been content. But there are nations so cowardly that they 
dare not merely conquer their enemies; they must mah siccar 
and destroy them. The generation of Romans that saw great- 
ness and virtue in a man like Cato the Censor, necessarily 
made their country a mean ally and a cowardly victor. 

§ T 

Th© history of Rome for the fifty-six years that elapsed be- 
tween the battle of Zama and the last act of the tragedy, the 
Third Punic War, tells of a bard ungracious expansion of 
power abroad and of a slow destruction, by the usury and greed 
of the rich, of the free agricultural population at home. 

The spirit of the nation had become harsh and base; there 
was no further extension of citizenship, no more generous at- 
tempts at the assimilation of congenial foreign populations. 
Spain was administered badly and settled slowly and with great 
difficulty. Complicated intei-ventions led to the reduction of 
Illyria and Macedonia to the position of tribute-paying prov- 
inces ; Rome, it was evident, was going to ''tax the foreigner" 
now and release her home population from taxation. After 
168 B.C. the old land tax was no longer levied in Italy, and the 
only revenue derived from Italy was from the state domains 
and through a tax on imports from overseas. The revenues 
from the province of ''Asia" defrayed the expenses of the 
Roman state. At home men of the Cato type were acquiring 
farms by loans and foreclosure, often the farms of men 
impoverished by war service; they were driving the 
free citizens off their land, and running their farms with 
the pitilessly driven slave labour that was made cheap and 
abundant. Such men regarded alien populations abroad merely 
as unimported slaves. Sicily was handed over to the gi-eedy 
enterprise of tax-farmers. Corn could be grown there by rich 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 413 

men using slaves, and imported very profitably into Eome, and 
so the home land could be turned over to cattle and sheep feed- 
ing. Consequently a drift of the uprooted Italian population 
to the towns, and particularly to Rome, began. 

Of the first confiicts of the spreading power of Rome with 
the Seleucids, and how she formed an alliance with Egypt, we 
can tell little here, nor of the tortuous fluctuations of the Greek 
cities under the shadow of her advance until they fell into 
actual subjugation. A map must suffice to show the extension 
of her empire at this time. 

The general grim baseness of the age was not without its 
protesting voices. We have already told how the wasting dis- 
ease of the Second Punic War, a disease of the state which was 
producing avaricious rich men exactly as diseases of the body 
will sometimes produce great pustules, was ended by the vigour 
of Scipio Africanus. When it had seemed doubtful whether 
the Senate would let him go as the Roman general, he had 
threatened an appeal to the people. Thereafter he was a 
marked man for the senatorial gang, who were steadily chang- 
ing Italy from a land of free cultivators to a land of slave- 
worked cattle ranches; they attempted to ruin him before ever 
he reached Africa; they gave him forces insufficient, as they 
hoped, for victoiy ; and after the war they barred him strictly 
from office. Interest and his natural malice alike prompted 
Cato to attack him. 

Scipio Africanus the Elder seems to have been of a generous 
and impatient temperament, and indisposed to exploit the popu- 
lar discontent with current tendencies and his own very great 
popularity to his own advantage. He went as subordinate to 
his brother Lucius Scipio, when the latter commanded the first 
Roman army to pass into Asia. At Magnesia in Lydia a great 
composite army under Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch, 
suffered the fate (190 b.c.) of the very similar Persian armies 
of a hundred and forty years before. This victory drew down 
upon Lucius Scipio the hostility of the Senate, and he was 
accused of misappropriating moneys received from Antiochus. 
This filled Africanus with honest rage. As Lucius stood up 
in the Senate with his accounts in his hands ready for the 
badgering of his accusers, Africanus snatched the documents 
from him, tore them up, and flung the fragments down. His 
brother, he said, had paid into the treasury 200,000 sestertia 



414. 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 415 

(= £2,000,000). Was ho now to be pestered and tripped up 
upon this or that item ? When, later on, Lucius was prosecuted 
and condemned, Africanus rescued him by force. Being im- 
peached, he reminded the people that the day was the anni- 
versary of the battle of Zama, and defied the authorities amidst 
the plaudits of the crowd. 

The Roman people seem to have liked and supported Scipio 
Africanus, and, after an interval of two thousand years, men 
must like him still. lie was able to throw torn paper in the 
face of the Senate, and when Lucius was attacked again, one 
of the tribunes of the people interposed his veto and quashed 
the proceedings. But Scipio Africanus lacked that harder 
alloy which makes men great democratic leaders. He was no 
CaBsar. He had none of the qualities that subdue a man to 
the base necessities of political life. After these events he 
retired in disgust from Rome to his estates, and there he died 
in the year 183 b.c. 

In the same year died Hannibal. He poisoned himself in 
despair. The steadfast fear of the Roman Senate had hunted 
him from court to court. In spite of the indignant protests of 
Scipio, Rome in the peace negotiations had demanded his sur- 
render from Carthage, and she continued to make this demand 
of every power that sheltered him. When peace was made with 
Antiochus III, this was one of the conditions. He was nin to 
earth at last in Bithynia ; the king of Bithynia detained him 
in order to send him to Rome, but he had long carried the 
poison he needed in a ring, and by this he died. 

It adds to the honour of the name of Scipio that it was an- 
other Scipio, Scipio !Nasica, who parodied Gate's Delenda est 
Carthago by ending all his speeches in the Senate with "Car- 
thage must stand." He had the wisdom to see that the exist- 
ence and stimulus of Carthage contributed to the general pros- 
ixirity of Rome. 

Yet it was the second Scipio Africanus, grandson by adoption 
of Scipio Africanus the Elder, who took and destroyed Car- 
thage. The sole offence of the Carthaginians, which brought 
about the third and last Punic War, was that they continued 
to trade and prosper. Their trade was not a trade that com- 
peted with that of Rome ; when Carthage was destroyed, much 
of her trade died with her, and North Africa entered upon a 
phase of economic retrogression; but her prosperity aroused 



41G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

that passion of envy which was evidently more powerful even 
than avarice in the ''old Eoman" type. The rich Equestrian 
order resented any wealth in the world but its own. Rome 
provoked the war by encouraging the Numidians to encroach 
upon Carthage until the Carthaginians were goaded to fight in 
despair. Rome then pounced upon Carthage, and declared 
she had broken the treaty! She had made war without 
permission. 

The Carthaginians sent the hostages Rome demanded, they 
surrendered their arms, they prepared to suiTender territory. 
But submission only increased the arrogance of Rome and the 
pitiless greed of the rich Equestrian order which swayed her 
counsels. She now demanded that Carthage should be aban- 
doned, and the population removed to a spot at least ten miles 
from the sea. This demand they made to a population that sub- 
sisted almost entirely by overseas trade! 

This preposterous order roused the Carthaginians to despair. 
They recalled their exiles and prepared for resistance. The 
military efficiency of the Romans had been steadily declining 
through a half-century of narrow-minded and base-spirited gov- 
ernment, and the first attacks upon the town in 149 b.c. almost 
ended in disaster. Young Scipio, during these operations, dis- 
tinguished himself in a minor capacity. The next year was also 
a year of failure for the incompetents of the Senate. That 
augiist body then passed from a bullying mood to one of ex- 
treme panic. The Roman populace was even more seriously 
scared. Young Scipio, chiefly on account of his name, although 
he was under the proper age, and in other respects not qualified 
for the office, was made consul, and bundled off to Africa to 
save his precious country. 

There followed the most obstinate and dreadful of sieges. 
Scipio built a mole across the harbour, and cut off all supplies 
by land or sea. The Carthaginians suffered horribly from 
famine ; but they held out until the town was stormed. The 
street fighting lasted for six days, and when at last the citadel 
capitulated, there were fifty thousand Carthaginians left alive 
out of an estimated population of half a million. These sur- 
vivors went into slavery, the whole city was burnt, the ruins 
were ploughed to express final destruction, and a curse was 
invoked with great solemnities upon anyone who might attempt 
to rebuild it. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 417 

In the same year (146 b.c.) the Koman Senate and Eques- 
trians also murdered another great city that seemed to limit 
their trade monopolies, Corinth. They had a justification, for 
Corinth had been in arms against them, but it was an inade- 
quate justification. 



We must note here, in a brief section, a change in the mili- 
tary system of Rome, after the Second Punic War, that was of 
enormous importance in her later development. Up to that 
period the Roman armies had been levies of free citizens. 
Fighting power and voting power were closely connected; the 
public assembly by centuries followed the paraphernalia of a 
military mobilization, and marched, headed by the Equestrian 
centuries, to the Campus Martins. The system was very like 
that of the Boers before the last war in South Africa. The 
ordinary Roman citizen, like the ordinary Boer, was a farmer ; 
at the summons of his country he went "on commando." The 
Boers were, indeed, in many respects, the last survivors of 
Aryanism. They fought extraordinarily well, but at the back 
of their minds was an anxious desire to go back to their farms. 
For prolonged operations, such as the siege of Veil, the Romans 
reinforced and relieved their troops in relays; the Boers did 
much the same at the siege of Ladysmith. 

The necessity for subjugating Spain after the Second Punic 
War involved a need for armies of a difi^erent type. Spain 
was too far oft" for periodic reliefs, and the war demanded a 
more thorough training than was possible with these on and off 
soldiers. Accordingly men were enlisted for longer terms and 
paid. So the paid soldier first appeared in Roman affairs. 
And to pay was added booty. Cato distributed silver treasure 
among his command in Spain ; and it is also on record that he 
attacked Scipio Africanus for distributing booty among his 
troops in Sicily. The introduction of military pay led on to a 
professional army, and this, a century later, to the disarma- 
ment of the ordinary Roman citizen, who was now drifting in 
an impoverished state into Rome and the larger towns. The 
great wars had been won, the foundations of the empire had 
been well and truly laid by the embattled farmers of Rome 



418 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

before 200 b.c. In the process the embattled farmers of Rome 
had already largely disappeared. The change that began after 
the Second Punic War was completed towards the close of 
the century in the reorganization of the army by Marius, as 
we will tell in its place. After his time we shall begin to write 
of "the army/' and then of "the legions," and we shall find 
we are dealing with a new kind of anny altogether, no longer 
held together in the solidarity of a common citizenship. As 
that tie fails, the legions discover another in espnt de corps, 
in their common difference from and their common interest 
against the general community. They begin to develop a 
warmer interest in their personal leaders, who secure them pay 
and plunder. Before the Punic Wars it was the tendency of 
ambitious men in Rome to court the plebeians; after that time 
they began to court the legions. 

§ 9 

The history of the Roman Republic thus far, is in many 
respects much more modern in flavour, especially to the Ameri- 
can or Western European reader, than anything that has pre- 
ceded it. For the first time we have something like a self-gov- 
erning "nation," something larger than a mere city state, 
seeking to control its own destinies. For the first time we 
have a wide countryside under one conception of law. We get 
in the Senate and the popular assembly a conflict of groups and 
personalities, an argimientative process of control, far more 
stable and enduring than any autocracy can be, and far more 
flexible and adaptable than any priesthood. For the first time 
also we encounter social conflicts comparable to our own. 
Money has superseded barter, and financial capital has become 
fluid and free ; not perhaps so fluid and free as it is to-day, but 
much more so than it had ever been before. The Punic Wars 
were wars of peoples, such as were no other wars we have yet 
recorded. Indubitably the broad lines of our present world, 
the main ideas, the chief oppositions, were appearing in those 
days. 

But, as we have already pointed out, certain of the elemen- 
tary facilities and some of the current political ideas of our 
time were still wanting in the Rome of the Punic Wars. There 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 419 



elected representatives in the popular assemblies. And an- 
other deficiency, very understandable to us nowadays, but quite 
beyond the scope of anyone then, was the absence of any general 
elementary political education at all. The plebeians of Eome 
had shown some glimmering of the idea that without knowledge 
votes cannot make men free, when they had insisted upon the 
publication of the law of the Twelve Tables; but tliey had 
never been able, it was beyond the possibilities of the time, to 
imagine any further extension of knowledge to the bulk of the 
people. It is only nowadays that men are beginning to under- 
stand fully the political significance of the maxim that "knowl- 
edge is power." Two British Trade Unions, for example, have 
recently set up a Labour College to meet the special needs of 
able working-men in history, political and social science, and 
the like. But education in republican Rome was the freak of 
the individual parent, and the privilege of wealth and leisure. 
It was mainly in the hands of Greeks, who were in many cases 
slaves. There was a thin small stream of very fine learning 
and very fine thinking up to the first century of the monarchy, 
let Lucretius and Cicero witness, but it did not spread into the 
mass of the people. The ordinary Roman was not only blankly 
ignorant of the history of mankind, but also of the conditions 
of foreign peoples ; he had no knowledge of economic laws nor 
of social possibilities. Even his own interests he did not 
clearly understand. 

Of course, in the little city states of Greece and in that early 
Roman state of four hundred square miles, men acquired by 
talk and observation a sufticient knowledge for the ordinary 
duties of citizenship, but by the beginning of the Punic Wars 
the business was already too big and complicated for illiterate 
men. Yet nobody seems to have observed the gap that was 

* Julius Caesar (60 B.C.) caused the proceedings of the Senate to be pub- 
lished by having them written up upon bulletin boards, in albo (upon 
the white). It had been the custom to publish the annual edict of the 
praetor in this fashion. There were professional letter-writers who sent 
news by special courier to rich country correspondents, and these would 
copy down the stuff upon the Album (white board). Cicero, while he 
was governor in Cilicia, got the current news from such a professional 
correspondent. He complains in one letter that it was not what he 
wanted; the expert was too full of the chariot races and other sporting 
intelligence, and failed to give any view of the political situation. Ob- 
viously this news-letter system was available only for public men in pros- 
perous circumstances. 



420 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

opening between the citizen and his state, and so there is no 
record at all of any attempt to enlarge the citizen by instruc- 
tion to meet his enlarged duties. From the second century b.c. 
and onward everyone is remarking upon the ignorance of the 
common citizen and his lack of political wisdom, everything is 
suffering from the lack of political solidarity due to this igno- 
rance, but no one goes on to what we should now consider the 
inevitable corollary, no one proposes to destroy the ignorance 
complained of. There existed no means whatever for the in- 
struction of the masses of the people in a common political and 
social ideal. It was only with the development of the great 
propagandist religions in the Eoman world, of which Chris- 
tianity was the chief and the survivor, that the possibility of 
such a systematic instruction of great masses of people became 
apparent in the world. That very great political genius, the 
Emperor Constantino the Great, six centuries later, was the 
first to apprehend and to attempt to use this possibility for the 
preservation and the mental and moral knitting-together of the 
world community over which he ruled. 

But it is not only in these deficiencies of news and of educa- 
tion and of the expedient of representative goveniment that 
this political system of Eome differed from our own. True, 
it was far more like a modern civilized state than any other 
state we have considered hitherto, but in some matters it was 
strangely primordial and "sub-civilized." Every now and then 
the reader of Roman history, reading it in terms of debates 
and measures, policies and campaigns, capital and labour, 
comes upon something that gives him much the same shock 
he would feel if he went down to an unknown caller in his 
house and extended his hand to meet the misshapen hairy paw 
of Homo Neanderthalensis and looked up to see a chinless, 
bestial face. We have noted the occurrence of human sacrifice 
in the third century B.C., and much that we learn of the religion 
of republican Rome carries us far back beyond the days of 
decent gods, to the age of shamanism and magic. We talk of a 
legislative gathering, and the mind flies to Westminster; but 
how should we feel if we went to see the beginning of a session 
of the House of Lords, and discovered the Lord Chancellor, 
with bloody fingers, portentously fiddling about among the 
entrails of a newly killed sheep ? The mind would recoil from 
Westminster to the customs of Benin. And the slavery of 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 



421 



Eome was a savage slavery, altogether viler than the slavery of 
Babylon. We have had a glimpse of the virtuous Cato among 
his slaves in the second century B.C. Moreover, in the third 
century B.C., when King Asoka was ruling India in light and 
gentleness, the Romans were reviving an Etruscan sport, the 
setting on of slaves to fight for their lives. One is reminded 
of West Africa again in the origin of this amusement ; it grew 
out of the prehistoric custom of a massacre of captives at the 




GladbitTR? 



C£xiui a waZI-pamiing' at Tamped) 



burial of a chief. There was a religious touch about this sport ; 
the slaves with hooks, who dragged the dead bodies out of the 
arena, wore masks to represent the infernal ferryman-god, 
Charon. In 264 B.C., the very year in which Asoka began to 
reign and the First Punic War began, the first recorded gladia- 
torial combat took place in the forum at Rome, to celebrate 
the funeral of a member of the old Roman family of Brutus. 
This was a modest display of three couples, but soon gladiators 
were fighting by the hundred. The taste for these combats 
grew rapidly, and the wars supplied an abundance of captives. 
The old Roman moralists, who were so severe upon kissing and 
women's ornaments and Greek philosophy, had nothing but 
good to say for this new development. So long as pain was 
inflicted, Roman morality, it would seem, was satisfied. 

If republican Rome was the first of modern self-governing 
national communities, she was certainly the "Neanderthal" 
form of them. 

In the course of the next two or three centuries the gladia- 
torial shows of Rome gTew to immense proportions. To begin 



422 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

with, while wars were frequent, the gladiators were prisoners 
of war. They came with their characteristic national weapons, 
tattooed Britons, Moors, Scythians, negroes, and the like, and 
there was perhaps some military value in these exliibitions. 
Then criminals of the lower classes condemned to death were 
also used. The ancient world did not understand that a crimi- 
nal condemned to death still has rights, and at any rate the use 
of a criminal as a gladiator was not so bad as his use as "mate- 
rial" for the vivisectors of the Museum at Alexandria. But 
as the profits of this sort of show business gi-ew and the demand 
for victims increased, ordinary slaves were sold to the trainers 
of gladiators, and any slave who had aroused his owner's spite 
might find himself in an establishment for letting out gladia- 
tors. And dissipated young men who had squandered their 
property, and lads of spirit would go voluntarily into the trade 
for a stated time, trusting to their prowess to survive. As the 
lousiness developed, a new use was found for gladiators as 
armed retainers; rich men would buy a band, and employ it 
as a bodyguard or hire it out for profit at the shows. The 
festivities of a show began with a ceremonial procession 
(pompa) and a sham fight (prwlusio). The real fighting was 
heralded by tnmipets. Gladiators who objected to fight for any 
reason were driven on by whips and hot irons. A wounded 
man would sometimes call for pity by holding up his forefinger. 
The spectators would then either wave their handkerchiefs in 
token of mercy, or condemn him to death by holding out their 
clenched fists with the thumbs down.^ The slain and nearly 
dead were dragged out to a particular place, the spoliarium, 
where they were stripped of their arms and possessions, and 
those who had not already expired were killed. 

This organization of murder as a sport and show serves to 
measure the great gap in moral standards between the Eoman 
community and our own. No doubt cruelties and outrages 
upon human dignity as monstrous as this still go on in the 
world, but they do not go on in the name of the law and without 
a single dissentient voice. For it is true that until the time 
of Seneca (first century a.d.) there is no record of any plain 
protest against this business. The conscience of mankind was 

* Authorities differ here. Mayor says thumbs up (to the breast) meant 
death and thumbs down meant "Lower that sword." The popular per- 
suasion is that thumbs down meant death. 



THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS 423 

weaker and less intelligeut then than now. Presently a new 
power was to come into the human conscience through the 
spread of Christianity. The spirit of Jesus in Christianity 
became the great antagonist in the later Roman state of these 
cruel shows and of slavery, and, as Christianity spread, these 
two evil things dwindled and disappeared.^ 

^ "A little more needs to be said on this matter. The Greeks cited gladia- 
torial shows as a reason for regarding the Romans as Barbaroi, and there 
were riots when some Roman proconsul tried to introduce them in Corinth. 
Among Romans, tlie better people evidently disliked them, but a sort of 
shyness prevented them from frankly denouncing them as cruel. For 
instance, Cicero, when he had to attend the Circus, took his tablets and 
his secretary with him, and didn't look. He expresses particular disgust 
at the killing of an elephant; and somebody in Tacitus (Drusus, Ann. 1. 
76) was unpopular because he was too fond of gladiatorial bloodshed — 
'qtiamquam vili sanguine nimis gaudcn&^ ('rejoicing too much in blood, 
worthless blood though it was'). The games were unhcsitatinglj' con- 
demned by Greek philosophy, and at different times two Cynics and one 
Christian gave their lives in the arena, protesting against them, before 
they were abolished. 

"I do not think Christianity had any such relation to slavery as is 
here stated. St. Paul's action in sending back a slave to his master, and 
his injunction, 'Slaves, obey your masters,' were regularly quoted on the 
pro-slavery side, down to the nineteenth century; on the other hand, both 
the popular philosophies and tlie Mystery religions were against slavery 
in their whole tendency, and Christianity of course in time became the chief 
representative of these movements. Probably the best test is the number 
of slaves who occupied posts of honour in the religious and philosophic 
systems, like Epictetus, for instance, or the many slaves who hold offices 
in the Mithraic Inscriptions. I do not happen to know if any slaves 
were made Christian bishops, but by analogy I should think it likely that 
some were. In all the Mystery religions, as soon as you entered the 
community, and had communion with God, earthly distinctions shrivelled 
away." — G. M. 



XXVII 

EROM TIBERIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD 
EMPEROR IN ROME 

§ 1. The Science of Thwarting the Common Man. § 2, 
Finance in the Roman State. § 3. The Last Years of Re- 
jjublican Polictics. § 4. The Era of the Adventurer Gen- 
erals. § 5. The End of the Republic. § 6. The Coming oj 
the Princeps. § 7. Why the Roman Republic Failed. 

§ 1 

WE have already twice likened the self-governing com- 
munity of Rome to a "Xeanderthal" variety of the 
modern "democratic" civilized state, and we shall 
recur again to this comparison. In form the two things, the 
first great primitive essay and its later relations, are extraordi- 
narily similar; in spirit they differ very profoundly. Roman 
political and social life, and particularly Roman political and 
social life in the century between the fall of Carthage and the 
rise of Caesar and Ca?sarism, has a very marked general re- 
semblance to the political and social life in such countries as 
the United States of America or the British Empire to-day. 
The resemblance is intensified by the common use, with a cer- 
tain inaccuracy in every case, of such terms as "senate," "democ- 
racy," "proletariat," and the like. But everything in the 
Roman state was earlier, cruder, and clumsier; the injustices 
were more glaring, the conflicts harsher. There was compara- 
tively little knowledge and few general ideas. Aristotle's sci- 
entific works were only beginning to be read in Rome in the 
first century b.c. ; Ferrero,^ it is tnie, makes Ceesar familiar 
with the Politics of Aristotle, and ascribes to him the dream 
of making a "Periclean Rome," but in doing so, Ferrero seems 
to be indulging in one of those lapses into picturesque romanc- 

* Greatness and Decline of Rome, bk. i. ch. xi. 
424 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 425 

ing whicli are at once the joy and the snare of all historical 
writers. 

Attention has already been drawn to the profound difference 
between Roman and modern conditions due to the absence of a 
press, of any popular education or of the representative idea 
in the popular assembly. Our world to-day is still far from 
solving the problem of representation and from producing a 
public assembly which will really summarize, crystallize, and 
express the thought and will of the community ; our elections 
are still largely an ingenious mockery of the common voter who 
finds himsef helpless in the face of party organizations which 
reduce his free choice of a representative to the less unpalatable 
of two political hacks, but, even so, his vote, in comparison 
with the vote of an ordinary honest Roman citizen, is an effec- 
tive instniment. Too many of our histories dealing with this 
period of Roman history write of "the popular party," and of 
the votes of the people and so forth, as though such things 
were as much working realities as they are to-day. But the 
senators and politicians of Rome saw to it that such things 
never did exist as clean and wholesome realities. These modern 
phrases are very misleading unless they are carefully qualified. 

We have already described the gatherings of the popular 
comitia ; but that clumsy assembly in sheep pens does not con- 
vey the full extent to which the gerrymandering of popular 
representation could be carried in Rome. Whenever there was 
a new enfranchisement of citizens in Italy, there would be the 
most elaborate trickery and counter-trickery to enrol the new 
voters into as few or as many of the thirty eld "tribes" as possi- 
ble, or to put them into as few as possible new tribes. Since 
the vote was taken by tribes, it is obvious that however gTeat 
the number of new additions made, if they were all got to- 
gether into one tribe, their opinion would only count for one 
tribal vote, and similarly if they were crowded into just a few 
tribes, old or new. On the other hand, if they were put into 
too many tribes their effect in any particular tribe might be 
inconsiderable. Here was the sort of work to fascinate every 
smart knave in politics. The comitia trihuta could be worked 
at times so as to vote right counter to the general feeling of 
the people. And as we have already noted, the great mass of 
voters in Italy were also disenfranchised by distance. About 
the middle period of the Carthaginian wars there were upwards 



4^6 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of 300,000 Eoman citizens; about 100 b.c. there were more 
than 900,000, but in effect the voting of the popular assembly 
was confined to a few score thousand resident in and near 
Rome, and mostly men of a base type. And the Roman voters 
were ''organized" to an extent that makes the Tammany ma- 
chine of New York seem artless and honest. They belonged 
to clubs, collegia sodalicia, having usually some elegant re- 
ligious pretensions; and the rising politician working his way 
to office went first to the usurers and then with the borrowed 
money to these clubs. If the outside voters were moved enough 
by any question to swarm into the city, it was always possible 
to put off the voting by declaring the omens unfavourable. If 
they came in unarmed, they could be intimidated; if they 
brought in arms, then the cry was raised that there was a plot 
to overthrow the republic, and a massacre would be organized. 

There can be no doubt that all Italy, all the empire was 
festering with discomfort, anxiety, and discontent in the cen- 
tury after the destruction of Carthage; a few men were grow- 
ing very rich, and the majority of people found themselves 
entangled in an inexplicable net of uncertain prices, jumpy 
markets, and debts ; but yet there was no way at all of stating 
and clearing up the general dissatisfaction. There is no record 
of a single attempt to make the popular assembly a straightfor- 
ward and workable public organ. Beneath the superficial ap- 
pearances of public affairs struggled a mute giant of public 
opinion and public will, who sometimes made some great po- 
litical effort a rush to vote or such like, and sometimes broke 
into actual violence. So long as there was no actual violence, 
the Senate and the financiers kept on in their own disastrous 
way. Only when they were badly frightened would governing 
cliques or parties desist from some nefarious policy and heed 
the common good. The real method of popular expression in 
Italy in those days was not the comitia trihuta, but the strike 
and insurrection, the righteous and necessary methods of all 
cheated or suppressed peoples. We have seen in our own days 
in Great Britain a decline in the prestige of parliamentary 
government and a drift towards unconstitutional methods on 
the part of the masses through exactly the same cause, through 
the incurable disposition of politicians to gerrymander the elec- 
toral machine until the community is driven to explosion. 

For insurrectionary purposes a discontented population needs 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 427 

a leader, and the political history of the concluding century of 
Koman republicanism is a history of insurrectionary leaders 
and counter-revolutionary leaders. Most of the former are 
manifestly unscrupulous adventurers who try to utilize the 
public necessity and unhappiness for their own advancement. 
Many of the historians of this period betray a disposition to 
take sides, and are either aristocratic in tone or fiercely demo- 
cratic ; but, indeed, neither side in these complex and intricate 
disputes has a record of high aims or clean hands. The Senate 
and the rich Equestrians were vulgar and greedy spirits, hostile 
and contemptuous towards the poor mob; and the populace 
was ignorant, unstable, and at least equally greedy. The 
Scipios in all this record shine by comparison, a group of gentle- 
men. To the motives of one or the other figures of the time, 
to Tiberius Gracchus, for example, we may perhaps extend 
the benefit of the doubt. But for the rest, they do but demon- 
strate how clever and cunning men may be, how subtle in con- 
tention, how brilliant in pretence, and how utterly wanting in 
wisdom or grace of spirit. "A shambling, hairy, brutish, but 
probably very cunning creature with a big brain behind/' so 
someone, I think it was Sir Harry Johnston, has described 
Homo Neanderthalensis. 

To this day we must still use similar terms to describe the 
soul of the politician. The statesman has still to oust the 
politician from his lairs and weapon heaps. History has still 
to become a record of human dignity. 

§ 2 

Another respect in which the Roman system was a crude 
anticipation of our own, and different from any preceding 
political system we have considered, was that it was a cash 
and credit-using system. Money had been in the world as yet 
for only a few centuries. But its use had been growing; it 
was providing a fluid medium for trade and enterprise, and 
changing economic conditions profoundly. In republican Rome, 
the financier and the "money" interest began to play a part 
recognizably similar to their roles to-day. 

We have already noted — in our account of Herodotus — that 
a first effect of money was to give freedom of movement and 
leisure to a number of people who could not otherwise have 



428 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

enJQyed these privileges. And that is the peculiar value of 
money to mankind. Instead of a worker or helper heing paid 
in kind and in such a v^^ay that he is tied as much in his en- 
joyment as in his labour, money leaves him free to do as he 
pleases amidst a wide choice of purchasable aids, eases, and 
indulgences. He may eat his money or drink it or give it to a 
temple or spend it in learning something or save it against 
some unforeseen occasion. That is the good of money, the free- 
dom of its universal convertibility. But the freedom money 
gives the poor man is nothing to the freedom money has given 
the rich man. With money rich men ceased to be tied to 
lands, houses, stores, flocks and herds. They could change the 
nature and locality of their possessions with an unheard-of 
freedom. In the third and second century B.C., this release, 
this untethering of wealth, began to tell upon the general eco- 
nomic life of the Eoman and Hellenized world. People began 
to buy land and the like not for use, but to sell again at a profit ; 
people borrowed to buy, speculation developed. No doubt there 
were bankers in the Babylon of 1000 B.C., but they lent 
in a far more limited and solid way, bars of metal and stocks 
of goods. That earlier world was a world of barter and pay- 
ment in kind, and it went slowly — and much more staidly and 
stably — for that reason. In that state the vast realm of China 
has remained almost down to the present time. 

The big cities before Rome were trading and manufacturing 
cities. Such were Corinth and Carthage and Syracuse. But 
Rome never produced a very considerable industrial popula- 
tion, and her warehouses never rivalled those of Alexandria. 
The little port of Ostia was always big enough for her needs. 
Rome was a political and financial capital, and in the latter 
respect, at least, she was a new sort of city. She imported 
profits and tribute, and very little went out from her in return. 
The wharves of Ostia were chiefly busy unloading corn from 
Sicily and Africa and loot from all the world. 

After the fall of Carthage the Roman imagination went wild 
with the hitherto unknown possibilities of finance. Money, 
like most other inventions, had "happened" to mankind, and 
men had still to develop — to-day they have still to perfect — 
the science and morality of money. One sees the thing "catch- 
ing on" in the recorded life and the writings of Cato the Censor. 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 429 

In his early days lie was bitterly virtuous against usury; in 
his later he was devising ingenious schemes for safe usury. 

In this curiously interesting century of Roman history we 
find man after man asking, "What has happened to Eome?" 
Various answers are made — a decline in religion, a decline from 
the virtues of the Roman forefathers, Greek "intellectual 
poison," and the like. We who can look at the problem with a 
large perspective, can see that what had happened to Rome 
was "money" — the new freedoms and chances and opportunities 
that money opened out. Money floated the Romans off the 
firm ground, everyone was getting hold of money, the majority 
by the simple expedient of rimning into debt ; the eastward ex- 
pansion of the empire was very largely a hunt for treasure in 
strong rooms and temples to keep pace with the hunger of the 
new need. The Equestrian order, in particular, became the 
money power. Everyone was developing property. Fanners 
were giving up corn and cattle, borrowing money, buying 
slaves, and starting the more intensive cultivation of oil and 
wine. Money was young in human experience and wild, no- 
body had it under control. It fluctuated greatly. It was now 
abundant and now scarce. Men made sly and crude schemes 
to corner it, to hoard it, to send up prices by releasing hoarded 
metals. A small body of very shrewd men was growing im- 
mensely rich. Many patricians were growing poor and irritated 
and unsci-upulous. Among the middle sort of peoples there was 
much hope, much adventure, and much more disappointment. 
The gi-owing mass of the expropriated was permeated by that 
vague, baffled, and hopeless sense of being inexplicably bested, 
which is the preparatory condition for all great revolutionary 
movements. 



The first conspicuous leader to appeal to the gathering revolu- 
tionary feeling in Italy was Tiberius Gracchus. He looks more 
like an honest man than any other figure in this period of 
history, unless it be Scipio Africanus the Elder. At first 
Tiberius Gracchus was a moderate reformer of a rather reac- 
tionary type. He wished to restore the yeoman class to prop- 
erty, very largely because he believed that class to be the back- 
bone of the army, and his military experience in Spain before 



430 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and after the destruction of Carthage had impressed upon him 
the declining efficiency of the legions. He was what we should 
call nowadays a *'Back-to-the4and" man. He did not under- 
stand and few people understand to-day, how much easier it is 
to shift population from the land into the towns, than to return 
it to the laborious and simple routines of agricultural life. He 
wanted to revive the Licinian laws, which had been established 
when Camillus built his temple of Concord nearly two centuries 
and a half before (see Chap, xxvi, § 2), so far as they broke up 
great estates and restrained slave labour. 

These Licinian laws had repeatedly been revived and re- 
peatedly lapsed to a dead letter again. It was only when the 
big proprietors in the Senate opposed this proposal that Tibe- 
rius Gracchus turned to the people and began a furious agitation 
for popular government. He created a commission to inquire 
into the title of all landowners. In the midst of his activities 
occurred one of the most extraordinary incidents in history. 
Attains, the king of the rich country of Pergamum in Asia 
Minor, died (133 b.c), and left his kingdom to the Koman 
people. 

It is difficult for us to understand the motives of this bequest. 
Pergamum was a country allied to Rome, and so moderately 
secure from aggression; and the natural consequence of such 
a will was to provoke a violent scramble among the senatorial 
gangs and a dispute between them and the people for the spoils 
of the new acquisition. Practically Attains handed over his 
country to be looted. There were of course many Italian busi- 
ness people established in the country and a strong party of 
native rich men in close relations with Rome. To them, no 
doubt, a coalescence with the Roman system would have been 
acceptable. Joscphus bears witness to such a desire for an- 
nexation among the rich men of Syria, a desire running counter 
to the wishes of both king and people. This Pergamum bequest, 
astonishing in itself, had the still more astonishing result of 
producing imitations in other quarters. In 96 b.c. Ptolemy 
Apion bequeathed Cyrenaica, in North Africa, to the Roman 
people; in 81 b.c. Alexander II, King of Egypt, followed suit 
with Egypt, a legacy too big for the courage if not for the 
appetite of the Senators, and they declined it; in 74 b.c. 
Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, demised Bithynia. Of these 
latter testamentary freaks we will say no more here. But it 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR, 431 

will be manifest how great an opportunity was given Tiberins 
Gracchus by the bequest of Attains, of accusing the rich of 
greed and of proposing to decree the treasures of Attains to 
the commonalty. He proposed to use this new wealth to provide 
seed, stock, and agricultural implements for the resettlement 
of the land. 

His movement was speedily entangled in the complexities of 
the Roman electoral system — without a simple and straight- 
forward electoral method, all popular movements in all ages 
necessarily become entangled and maddened in constitutional 
intricacies, and almost as necessarily lead to bloodshed. It was 
needed, if his work was to go on, tJiat Tiberius Gracchus should 
continue to be tribune, and it was illegal for him to be tribune 
twice in succession. He overstepped the bounds of legality, and 
stood for the tribuneship a second time; the peasants who 
came in from the countryside to vote for him came in anned; 
the cry that he was aiming at a tyranny, the cry that had long 
ago destroyed Miplius and Manlius, was raised in the Senate, 
the friends of ''law and order" went to the Capitol in state, ac- 
companied by a rabble of dependents armed with staves and 
bludgeons; there was a conflict, or rather a massacre of the 
revolutionaries, in which nearly three hundred people were 
killed, and Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death with the 
fragments of a broken bench by two Senators. 

Thereupon the Senators attempted a sort of counter-revolu- 
tion, and proscribed many of the followers of Tiberius Gracchus ; 
but the state of public opinion was so sullen and threatening 
that this movement was dropped and Scipio Nasica, who was 
implicated in the death of Tiberius, though he occupied the 
position of pontifex maximus and should have remained in 
Rome for the public sacrifices which were the duties of that 
official, went abroad to avoid trouble. 

The uneasiness of Italy next roused Scipio Africanus the 
Younger to propose the enfranchisement of all Italy. But he 
died suddenly before he could carry the proposal into effect. 

Then followed the ambiguous career of Cains Gracchus, the 
brother of Tiberius, who followed some tortuous "policy" that 
still exercises the mind of historians. He increased the burthens 
of taxation laid upon the provinces, it is supposed with the idea 
of setting the modern financiers (the Equites) against the sena- 
torial landowners. He gave the former the newly bequeathed 



432 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

taxes of Asia to farm, and, what is worse, he ^ave them control 
of the special courts set up to prevent extortion. He started 
enormous public works and particularly the construction of 
new roads, and he is accused of making a political use of the 
contracts. He revived the proposal to enfranchise Italy. He 
increased the distribution of subsidized cheap corn to the Roman 
citizens. . . . Here we cannot attempt to disentangle his 
schemes, much less to judge him. But that his policy was offen- 
sive to the groups that controlled the Senate there can be no 
doubt whatever. He was massacred by the champions of "law 
and order," with about three thousands of his followers, in 
the streets of Rome in 121 b.c. His decapitated head was 
carried to the Senate on the point of a pike. 

(A reward of its weight in gold, says Plutarch, had been 
offered for this trophy : and its captor, acting in the true spirit 
of a champion of "big business," filled the brain-case with lead 
on its way to the scales.) 

"In spite of these prompt firm measures the Senate was not 
to enjoy the benefits of peace and the advantages of a control 
of the imperial resources for long. Within ten years the people 
were in revolt again. 

In 118 B.C. the throne of Numidia, the semi-barbaric king- 
dom that had arisen in North Africa upon the ruins of the 
civilized Carthaginian power, was seized by a certain able 
Jugurtha, who had served with the Roman armies in Spain, and 
had a knowledge of the Roman character. He provoked the 
military intervention of Rome. But the Romans found that 
their military power, under a Senate of financiers and land- 
lords, was very different from what it had been even in the days 
of the younger Scipio Africanus. "Jugurtha bought over the 
Commissioners sent out to watch him, the Senators charged 
with their prosecution, and the generals in command against 
him." ^ There is a mistaken Roman proverb : "pecunid non 
olet" (money does not stink), for the money of Jugurtha stank 
even in Rome. There was an angry agitation ; and a capable 
soldier of lowly origin, Marius, was carried to the consulship 
(107 B.C.) on the wave of popular indigiiatiori. Marius made 
no attempt on the model of the Gracchi to restore the backbone 
of the army by rehabilitating the yeoman class. He was a 
professional soldier with a high standard of efficiency and a 
' Ferrero. 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 433 

disposition to take short cuts. He simply raised troops from 
among tlie poor, whether countrymen or townsmen, paid them 
well, disciplined them thoroughly, and (106 b.c.) ended the 
seven years' war with Jugiirtlia by bringing that chieftain in 
chains to Rome. It did not occur to anybody that incidentally 
Marius had also created a professional army with no interest 
to hold it together but its pay. He then held on to the consul- 
ship more or less illegally for several years, and in 102 and 101 
B.C. repelled a threatening move of the Germans (who thus 
appear in our history for the first time), who were raiding 
through Gaul towards Italy. He gained two victories ; one on 
Italian soil. He was hailed as the saviour of his country, a 
second Camillus (100 b.c). 

The social tensions of the time mocked that comparison with 
Camillus. The Senate benefited by the greater energy in for- 
eign affairs and the increased military efficiency that Marius 
had introduced, but the sullen, shapeless discontent of the mass 
of the people was still seeking some effective outlet. The rich 
grew richer and the poor poorer. It was impossible to stifle 
the consequences of that process for ever by political trickery. 
The Italian people were still unenfranchised. Two extreme 
democratic leaders, Saturninus and Glaucia, were assassinated, 
but that familiar senatorial remedy failed to assuage the popu- 
lace on this occasion. In 92 b.c. an aristocratic official, Rutilius 
Rufus, who had tried to restrain the exactions of the financiers 
in Asia Minor, was condemned on a charge of corruption so 
manifestly trumped up that it deceived no one; and in 91 b.c, 
Livius Drusus, a newly elected tribune of the people, who was 
making capital out of the trial of Rutilius Rufus, was assassi- 
nated. He had proposed a general enfranchisement of the 
Italians, and he had foreshadowed not only another land law, 
but a general abolition of debts. Yet for all this vigour on 
the part of the senatorial usurers, landgrabbers, and forestallers, 
the hungry and the anxious were still insurgent. The murder 
of Drusus was the last drop in the popular cup ; Italy blazed into 
a desperate insurrection. 

There followed two years of bitter civil war, the Social War. 
It was a war between the idea of a united Italy and the idea of 
the rule of the Roman Senate. It was not a "social" war in 
the modem sense, but a war between Rome and her Italian 
allies (allies = Socii). "Roman generals, trained in the tradi- 



434 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tions of colonial warfare, marched ruthlessly up and down Italy, 
burnintr farms, sacking towns, and carrying off men, women, 
and children, to sell them in the open market or work them 
in gangs upon their estates." ^ Marius and an aristocratic gen- 
eral, Sulla, who had been with him in Africa and who was 
his bitter rival, both commanded on the side of Rome. But 
though the insurgents experienced defeats and looting, neither 
of these generals brought the war to an end. It was ended in 
a manner (89 b.c.) by the practical surrender of the Roman 
Senate to the idea of reform. The spirit was taken out of the 
insurrection by the concession of their demands "in principle" ; 
and then as soon as the rebels had dispersed, the usual cheating 
of the new voters^ by such methods as we have explained in § 1 
of this chapter, was resumed. 

By the next year (88 b.c.) the old round had begun again. It 
was mixed up with the personal intrigues of Marius and Sulla 
against each other ; but the struggle had taken on another com- 
plexion through the army reforms of Marius, which had created 
a new type of legionary, a landless professional soldier with no 
interest in life but pay and plunder, and with no feeling of loy- 
alty except to a successful general. A popular tribune, Sul- 
picius, was bringing forward some new laws affecting debt, and 
the consuls were dodging the storai by declaring a suspension 
of public business. Then came the usual resort to violence, and 
the followers of Sulpicius drove the consuls from the fonim. 
But here it is that the new forces which the new army had 
made possible came into play. King Mithridates of Pontus, 
the Hellenized king of the southern shores of the Black Sea 
east of Bithynia, was pressing Rome into war. One of the 
proposed laws of Sulpicius was that Marius should command 
the armies sent against this Mithridates. Whereupon Sulla 
marched the army he had commanded throughout the Social 
War to Rome, Marius and Sulpicius fled, and a new age, an 
age of military pronunciamentos, began. 

Of how Sulla had himself made commander against Mithri- 
dates and departed, and of how legions friendly to Marius then 
seized power, how Marius returned to Italy and enjoyed a 
thorough massacre of his political opponents and died, sated, 
of fever, we cannot tell in any detail. But one measure dur- 
ing the Marian reign of terror did much to relieve the social 
* Ferrero. 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 435 

tension, and that was the abolition of three-qnarters of all out- 
standing debts. Nor can we tell here how Sulla made a dis- 
creditable peace with Mithridates (who had massacred a 
hundred thousand Italians in Asia Minor) in order to bring his 
legions back to Rome, defeat the Marians at the battle of the 
CoUine Gate of Eome, and reverse the arrangements of Marius. 
Sulla restored law and order by the proscription and execu- 
tion of over five thousand people. He desolated large parts of 
Italy, restored the Senate to power, repealed many of the 
recent laws, though he was unable to restore the cancelled 
burden of debt, and then, feeling bored by politics and having 
amassed great riches, he retired with an air of dignity into 
private life, gave himself up to abominable vices, and so pres- 
ently died, eaten up with some disgusting disease produced 
by debauchery.^ 



Political life in Italy was not so much tranquillized as 
stunned by the massacres and confiscations of Marius and Sulla. 
The scale upon which this history is planned will not pemiit us 
to tell here of the great adventurers who, relying more and 
more on the support of the legions, presently began to scheme 
and intrigue again for dictatorial power in Rome. In 73 b.c. 
all Italy was terrified by a rising of the slaves, and particularly 
of the gladiators, led by a gladiator from Thessaly, Spartacus. 
He and seventy others had fied out from a gladiatorial "farm" 
at Capua. Similar risings had already occurred in Sicily. 
The forces under Spartacus necessarily became a miscellaneous 
band drawn from east and west, without any common idea 
except the idea of dispersing and getting home ; nevertheless, he 
held out in southern Italy for two years, using the then ap- 
parently extinct crater of Vesuvius for a time as a natural 
fortress. The Italians, for all their love of gladiatorial display, 
failed to appreciate this conversion of the whole country into 
an arena, this bringing of the gladiatorial sword to the door, 
and when at last Spartacus was overthrown, their terror changed 
to frantic cruelty, six thousand of his captured followers were 

* Plutarch. To which, however, G. M. adds the following note: "It is 
generally believed that Sulla died through bursting a blood-vessel in a fit 
of temper. The story of abominable vices seems to be only the regular 
slander of the Roman mob against anyone who did not live in public." 



436 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

crucified — long miles of nailed and drooping victims^ — along 
the Appian Way. 

Here we cannot deal at any length with Lucullus, who in- 
vaded Pontus and fought Mithridates, and brought the culti- 
vated cherry-tree to Europe; nor can we tell how ingeniously 
Pompey the Great stole the triumph and most of the prestige 
Lucullus had won in Armenia beyond Pontus. Lucullus, like 
Sulla, retired into an opulent private life, but with more ele- 
gance and with a more gracious end. We cannot relate in any 
detail h6w Julius Caesar accumulated reputation in the west, 
by conquering Gaul, defeating the German tribes upon the 
Rhine, and pushing a punitive raid across the Straits of Dover 
into Britain. More and more important grow the legions ; 
less and less significant are the Senate and the assemblies of 
Rome. But there is a certain grim humour about the story 
of Crassus that we cannot altogether neglect. 

This Crassus was a great money-lender and forestaller. He 
was a typical man of the new Equestrian type, the social equiva- 
lent of a modern munition profiteer. He first grew rich by 
buying up the property of those proscribed by Sulla. His 
earliest exploits in the field were against Spartacus, whom 
finally he crushed by gi'eat payments and exertions after a 
prolonged and expensive campaign. He then, as the outcome of 
complicated bargains, secured the command in the east and 
prepared to emulate the glories of Lucullus, who had pushed east 
from Pergamum and Bithynia into Pontus, and of Pompey, 
who had completed the looting of Armenia. 

His experiences serve to demonstrate the gross ignorance 
with which the Romans were conducting their affairs at that 
time. He crossed the Euphrates, expecting to find in Persia 
another Hellenized kingdom like Pontus. But, as we have 
already intimated, the great reservoirs of nomadic peoples that 
stretched round from the Danube across Russia into Central 
Asia, had been raining back into the lands between the Caspian 
Sea and the Indus that Alexander had conquered for Hellenism. 
Crassus found himself against the "Scythian" again; against 
mobile tribes of horsemen led by a monarch in Median costume.^ 
The particular variety of "Scythian" he encountered was called 
the Parthian. It is possible that in tlie Parthians a Mongo- 
lian (Turanian) element was now mingled with the Aryan 
* Plutarch. 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 437 

strain; but the campaign of Crassus beyond the Euphrates is 
curiously like the cuiiipaign of Darius beyond the Danube ; there 
is the same heavy thrusting of an infantry force against elu- 
sive light hoi'semen. But Crassus was less quick than Darius 
to realize the need of withdrawal, and the Parthians were bet- 
ter bowmen than the Scythians Darius met. They seem to 
have had some sort of noisy projectile of unusual strength and 
force, something different from an ordinary arrow. ^ The cam- 
paign culminated in that two days' massacre of the hot, thirsty, 
hungry, and weary Roman legions which is known as the 
battle of Carrha? (53 e.g.). They toiled through the sand, charg- 
ing an enemy who always evaded their charge and rode round 
them and shot them to pieces. Twenty thousand of them were 
killed, and ten thousand marched on eastward as prisoners into 
slavery in Iran. 

What became of Crassus is not clearly known. There is a 
story, probably invented for our moral benefit and suggested 
by his usuries, that he fell alive into the hands of the Parthians 
and was killed by having molten gold poured down his throat. 

But this disaster has a very great significance indeed to our 
general history of mankind. It serves to remind us that from 
the Rhine to the Euphrates, all along to the north of the Alps 
and Danube and Black Sea, stretched one continuous cloud 
of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, whom the statescraft 
of imperial Rome was never able to pacify and civilize, nor 
her military science subdue. We have already called atten- 
tion to a map showing how the Second Babylonian Empire, 
the Chaldean Empire, lay like a lamb in the embrace of the 
Median power. In exactly the same way the Roman Empire 
lay like a lamb in the embrace of this great crescent of outer 
barbarians. Not only was Rome never able to thrust back 
or assimilate that superincumbent crescent, but she was never 
able to organize the Mediterranean Sea into a secure and 

^The bow was probably the composite bow, so-called because it is made 
of several plates (five or so) of horn, like the springs of a carriage: it 
discharges a high-speed arrow with a twang. This was the bow the Mon- 
gols used. This short composite bow (it was not a long bow) was quite 
old in human experience. It was the bow of Odysseus; the Assyrians had 
it in a modified form. It went out in Greece, but it survived as 
the Mongol bow. It was quite short, very stifT to pull, with a flat 
trajectory, a remarkable range, and a great noise (cp. Homer's 
reference to the twang of the bow). It went out in the Mediterranean 
because the climate was not good for it, and because there were insuffi- 
cient animals to supply the horn. — J. L. M. 



438 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 439 

orderly system of communication between one part of her em- 
pire and another. Quite unknown as yet to Rome, the Mon- 
golian tribes from North-eastern Asia, the Huns and their 
kin, walled back and driven out from China by the Tsi and 
Han dynasties, were drifting and pressing westward, mixing 
with the Parthians, the Scythians, the Teutons and the like, 
or driving them before them. 

■ Never at any time did the Romans succeed in pushing their 
empire beyond Mesopotamia, and upon Mesopotamia their hold 
was never very secure. Before the close of the republic that 
power of assimilation which had been the secret of their success 
was giving way to "patriotic" exclusiveness and ''patriotic" 
greed. Rome plundered and destroyed Asia Minor and Baby- 
lonia, which were the necessary basis for an eastward extension 
to India, just as she had destroyed and looted Carthage and 
so had no foothold for extension into Africa, and just as she had 
destroyed Corinth and so cut herself off from an easy way into 
the heart of Greece. Western European writers, impressed 
by the fact that later on Rome Romanized and civilized Gaul 
and South Britain and restored the scene of her earlier devasta- 
tions in Spain to prosperity, are apt to ignore that over far 
greater areas to the south and east her influence was to weaken 
and so restore to barbarism the far wider conquests of Hellenic 
civilization. 

§ 5 

But among the politicians of Italy in the first century b.c. 
there were no maps of Germany and Russia, Africa and Cen- 
tral Asia, and no sufficient intelligence to study them had they 
existed. Rome never developed the fine curiosities that sent 
Hanno and the sailors of Pharaoh Necho down the coasts of 
Africa. When, in the first century b.c, the emissaries of the 
Han dynasty reached the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, they 
found only stories of a civilization that had receded. The 
memory of Alexander still lived in these lands, but of Rome 
men only knew that Pompey had come to the western shores 
of the Caspian and gone away again, and that Crassus had 
been destroyed. Rome was pre-occupied at home. What men- 
tal energy remained over in the Roman citizen from the at- 
tempt to grow personally rich and keep personally safe was 



440 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

intent npon the stratagems and strokes and counter-strokes of 
the various adventurers who were now manifestly grappling for 
the supreme power. 

It is the custom of historians to treat these struggles with 
extreme respect. In particular the figure of Julius Caesar 
is set up as if it were a star of supreme brightness and impor- 
tance in the history of mankind. Yet a dispassionate considera- 
tion of the known facts fails altogether to justify this demi- 
god theory of Caesar. Not even that precipitate wrecker of 
splendid possibilities, Alexander the Great, has been so magni- 
fied and dressed up for the admiration of careless and uncritical 
readers. There is a type of scholar who, to be plain, sits and 
invents marvellous world policies for the more conspicuous 
figures in history with the merest scraps of justification or with 
no justification at all. We are told that Alexander planned 
the conquest of Carthage and Eome and the complete subjuga- 
tion of India and that only his death shattered these schemes. 
What we know for certain is that he conquered the Persian 
Empire, and never went far beyond its boundaries ; and that 
when he was supposed to be making these vast and noble plans, 
he was in fact indulging in such monstrous antics as his mourn- 
ing for his favourite Hepha'stion, and as his main occupation he 
was drinking himself to death. So, too, Julius Caesar is cred- 
ited with the intention of doing just that one not impossible 
thing which would have secured the Roman Empire from its 
ultimate collapse — namely, the systematic conquest and civiliza- 
ticvn of Europe as far as the Baltic and the Dnieper. He was 
to have marched upon Germany, says Plutarch, through Par- 
thia and Scythia, round the north of the Caspian and Black Seas. 
Yet the fact we have to reconcile with this wise arid magnificent 
project is that at the crest of his power, Caesar, already a bald, 
middle-aged man, past the graces and hot impulses of youthful 
love, spent the better part of a year in Egypt, feasting and 
entertaining himself in amorous pleasantries with the Egyptian 
queen, Cleopatra. And afterwards he brought her with him to 
Rome, where her influence over him was bitterly resented. 
Such complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist 
or sentimentalistr—he was fifty-four at the commencement of 
the affaire — rather than the master-ruler of men. 

On the side of the superman idea of Csesar, we have to count 
a bust in the Naples Museum, It represents a fine and in- 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 441 

tellectual face, very noble in its expression, and we can couple 
with that the story that his head, even at birth, was unusually 
large and finely formed. But there is really no satisfying 
evidence that this well-known bust does represent Caisar, and 
it is hard to reconcile its austere serenity with the reputation 
for violent impulse and disorderliness that clung to him. Other 
busts of a quite different man are also, with more probability, 
ascribed to him. 

There can be little doubt that he was a dissolute and extrava- 
gant young man — the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn 
in Bithynia, whither he fled from Sulla; he was the associate 
of the reprobate Clodius and the conspirator Catiline, and 
there is nothing in his political career to suggest any aim 
higher or remoter than his own advancement to power, and all 
the personal glory and indulgence that power makes possible. 
We will not attempt to tell here of the turns and devices of his 
career. Although he was of an old patrician family, he came 
into politics as the brilliant darling of the people. He spent 
great sums and incurred heavy debts to provide public festivals 
on the most lavish scale. He opposed the tradition of Sulla, and 
cherished the memory of Marius, who was his uncle by mar- 
riage. For a time he worked in conjunction with Crassus and 
Pompey, but after the death of Crassus he and Pompey came 
into conflict. By 49 b.c. he and Pompey, with their legions, 
he from the west and Pompey from the east, were fighting 
openly for predominance in the Eoman state. He had broken 
the law by bringing his legions across the Eubicon, which was 
the boundary between his command and Italy proper. At the 
battle of Pharsalos in Thessaly (48 b.c), Pompey was routed, 
and, fleeing to Egypt, was murdered, leaving Csesar more 
master of the Roman world than ever Sulla had been. 

He was then created dictator for ten years in 46 e.g., and 
early in 45 b.c. he was made dictator for life. This was mon- 
archy ; if not hereditary monarchy, it was at least electoral life 
monarchy. It was unlimited opportunity to do his best for the 
world. And by the spirit and quality of his use of this dicta- 
torial power during these four years we are bound to judge 
him. A certain reorganization of local administration he ef- 
fected, and he seems to have taken up what was a fairly obvi- 
ous necessity of the times, a project for the restoration of the 
two murdered seaports of Corinth and Carthage, whose destruc- 



442 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



tion had wrecked the sea-life of the Mediterranean. But much 
more evident was the influence of Cleopatra and Egypt upon 
his mind. Like Alexander before him, his head seems to have 
been turned by the king-god tradition, assisted no doubt in his 
case by the adulation of that charming hereditary goddess, 
Cleopatra. We find evidence of exactly that same conflict upon 
the score of divine pretensions, between him and his personal 
friends, that we have already recorded in the case of Alexander. 
So far as the Hellenized east was concerned, the paying of divine 

honours to rulers 
was a familiar idea ; 
but it was still re- 
pulsive to the linger- 
ing Aryanism of 
Rome. 

Antony, who had 
been his second in 
command at Phar- 
salos, was one of the 
chief of his flat- 
terers. Plutarch de- 
scribes a scene at the 
public games in 
which Antony tried 
to force a crdwn 
upon Cfpsar, which 
Caesar, after a little 
coyness and in face 
of the manifested 
displeasure of the 
crowd, refused. But 
he had adopted the 
ivory sceptre and throne, which were the traditional insignia 
of the ancient kings of Rome. His image was carried amidst 
that of the gods in the opening pompa of the arena, and his 
statue was set up in a temple with an inscription, "To the 
Unconquerable God!" Priests even were appointed for his 
godhead. These things are not the s\Tnptoms of great-minded- 
ness, but of a common man's megalomania. Caesar's record 
of vulgar scheming for the tawdriest mockeries of personal 
worship is a silly and shameful record; it is incompatible with 




JVLIVS CJESAR 

(-from the TVapW hust') 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 443 

the idea that he was a wise and wonderful superman setting 
the world to rights. 

Finally (44 b.c. ) he was assassinated by a group of his own 
friends and supporters, to whom these divine aspirations had 
become intolerable. He was beset in the Senate, and stabbed 
in three and twenty places, dying at the foot of the statue of 
his fallen rival Pompey the Great. The scene marks the com- 
plete demoralization of the old Roman governing body. Brutus, 
the ringleader of the murderers, would have addressed the 
senators, but, confronted by this crisis, they were scuttling off 
in every direction. For the best part of a day Rome did not 
know what to make of this event ; the murderers marched 
about with their bloody weapons through an undecided city, 
with no one gainsaying them and only a few joining them ; 
then public opinion turned against them, some of their houses 
were attacked, and they had to hide and fly for their lives. 

§ 6 

But the trend of things was overwhelmingly towards mon- 
archy. For thirteen years more the struggle of personalities 
went on. One single man is to be noted as inspired by broad 
ideas and an ambition not entirely egoistic, Cicero. He was a 
man of modest origin, whose eloquence and literary power had 
won him a prominent place in the Senate. He was a little 
tainted by the abusive tradition of Demosthenes, nevertheless 
he stands out, a noble and pathetically ineffective figure, plead- 
ing with the now utterly degenerate, base, and cowardly Sen- 
ate for the high ideals of the Republic. He was a writer of 
great care and distinction, and the orations and private letters 
he has left us make him one of the most real and living figures 
of this period to the modern reader. He was proscribed and 
killed in 43 b.c, the year after the murder of Julius Cgesar, 
and his head and hands were nailed up in the Roman forum. 
Octavian, who became at last the monarch of Rome, seems to 
have made an effort to save Cicero ; that murder was certainly 
not his crime. 

Here we cannot trace out the tangle of alliances and be- 
trayals that ended in the ascendancy of this Octavian, the 
adopted heir of Julius Ciesar. The fate of the chief figures 
is interwoven with that of Cleopatra. 



444 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

After the deatli of Caesar, she set herself to capture the emo- 
tions and vanity of Antony, a much younger man than Csesar, 
with whom she was probably already acquainted. For a time 
Octavian and Antony and a third figure, Lepidus, divided the 
Eoman world just as Ca?sar and Pompey had divided it before 
their final conflict. Octavian took the hardier west, and con- 
solidated his power; Antony had the more gorgeous east — 
and Cleopatra. To Lepidus fell that picked bone, Carthaginian 
Africa. He seems to have been a good man of good traditions, 
set upon the restoration of Carthage rather than upon wealth 
or personal vanities. The mind of Antony succumbed to those 
same ancient ideas of divine kingship that had already proved 
too much for the mental equilibrium of Julius Caesar. In the 
company of Cleopatra he gave himself up to love, amusements, 
and a dream of sensuous glory, until Octavian felt that the time 
was ripe to end these two Egyptian divinities. 

In 32 B.C. Octavian induced the Senate to depose Antony 
from the command of the east, and proceeded to attack him. A 
great naval battle at Actium (31 b.c.) was decided by the un- 
expected desertion of Cleopatra with sixty ships in the midst of 
the fight. It is quite impossible for us to decide now whether 
this was due to premeditated treachery or to the sudden whim 
of a charming woman. The departure of these ships threw 
the fleet of Antony into hopeless confusion, which was in- 
creased by the headlong flight of this model lover in pursuit. 
He went ofi^ in a swift galley after her without informing his 
commanders. He left his followers to fight and die as they 
thought fit, and for a time they were incredulous that he had 
gone. The subsequent encounter of the two lovers and their 
reconciliation is a matter for ironical speculation on the part 
of Plutarch. 

Octavian's net closed slowly round his rival. It is not im- 
probable that there was some sort of understanding between 
Octavian and Cleopatra, as perhaps in the time of Julius Csesar 
there may have been between the queen and Antony. Antony 
gave way to much mournful posturing, varied by love scenes, 
during this last stage of his little drama. For a time he posed 
as an imitator of the cvnic Timon, as one who had lost all 
faith in mankind, though one may think that his deserted 
sailors at Actium had better reason for such an attitude. Fi- 
nally he found himself and Cleopatra besieged by Octavian in 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 445 

Alexandria. There were some sallies and minor successes, and 
Antony was loud with challenges to Octavian to decide the mat- 
ter by personal combat. Being led to believe that Cleopatra 
had committed suicide, this star of romance stabbed himself, 
but so ineffectually as to die lingeringly, and he was carried 
off to expire in her presence (30 b.c). 

Plutarch's account of Antony, which was derived very 
largely from witnesses who had seen and known him, describes 
him as of heroic mould. He is compared to the demigod Her- 
cules, from whom indeed he claimed descent, and also to the 
Indian Bacchus. There is a disgusting but illuminating de- 
scription of a scene in the Senate when he attempted to speak 
while drunk, and was overtaken by one of the least dignified 
concomitants of intoxication. 

For a little while Cleopatra still clung to life, and perhaps 
to the hope that she might reduce Octavian to the same divine 
role that had already been played by Julius Cffisar and Antony. 
She had an interview with Octavian, in which she presented 
herself as beauty in distress and very lightly clad. But when 
it became manifest that Octavian lacked the godlike spark, 
and that his care for her comfort and welfare was dictated 
chiefly by his desire to exhibit her in a triumphal procession 
through the streets of Eome, she also committed suicide. An 
asp was smuggled to her past the Roman sentries, concealed in 
a basket of figs, and by its fangs she died. 

Octavian seems to have been almost entirely free from the 
divine aspirations of Julius Caesar and Antony. He was neither 
God nor romantic hero; he was a man. He was a man of far 
greater breadth and capacity than any other player in this last 
act of the Republican drama in Rome. All things considered, 
he was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Rome 
at that time. He "voluntarily resigned the extraordinary pow- 
ers which he had held since 43, and, to quote his own words, 
'handed over the republic to the control of the senate and the 
people of Rome.' The old constitutional machinery was once 
more set in motion ; the senate, assembly, and magistrates re- 
sumed their functions, and Octavian himself was hailed as the 
'restorer of the commonwealth and the champion of freedom.' 
It was not so easy to determine what relation he himself, the 
actual master of the Roman world, should occupy towards 
this revived republic. His abdication, in any real sense of 



446 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the word, would have simply thrown everything back into 
confusion. The interests of peace and order required that he 
should retain at least the substantial part of his authority ; and 
this object was in fact accomplished, and the rule of the em- 
perors founded in a manner which has no parallel in history. 
Any revival of the kingly title was out of the question, and 
Octavian himself expressly refused the dictatorship. Nor was 
any new office created or any new official title invented for his 
benefit. But by senate and people he was invested according 
to the old constitutional forms with certain powers, as many 
citizens had been before him, and so took his place by the side 
of the lawfully appointed magistrates of the republic; only, 
to mark his pre-eminent dignity, as the first of them all, the 
senate decreed that he should take as an additional cognomen 
that of 'Augustus,' while in common parlance he was hence- 
forth styled Princeps, a simple title of courtesy, familiar to 
republican usage and conveying no other idea than that of a 
recognized primacy and precedence over his fellow-citizens. 
The ideal sketched by Cicero in his De Republica, of a constitu- 
tional president of a free republic, was apparently realized; 
but it was only in appearance. For in fact the special preroga- 
tives conferred upon Octavian gave him back in substance the 
autocratic authority he had resigned, and as between the re^ 
stored republic and its new princeps the balance of power was 
overwhelmingly on the side of the latter." ^ 

§ 'J' 

In this manner it was that Koman republicanism ended in a 
princeps or ruling prince, and the first great experiment in a 
self-governing community on a scale larger than that of tribe 
or city, collapsed and failed. 

The essence of its failure was that it could not sustain unity. 
In its early stages its citizens, both patrician and plebeian, had 
a certain tradition of justice and good faith, and of the loyalty 
of all citizens to the law, and of the goodness of the law for all 
citizens ; it clung to this idea of the importance of the law and 
of law-abidingness nearly into the first century b.c. But the 
unforeseen invention and development of money, the tempta- 
tions and disruptions of imperial expansion, the entanglement of 
*H. S. Jones in The Encyclop<sdia Britannica, article "Rome." 



FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 447 

electoral methods, weakened and swamped this tradition by pre- 
senting old issues in new disguises under which the judgment 
did not recognize them, and by enabling men to be loyal to the 
professions of citizenship and disloyal to its spirit. The bond 
of the Roman people had always been a moral rather than a 
religious bond; their religion was sacrificial and superstitious; 
it embodied no such great ideas of a divine leader and of a 
sacred mission as Judaism was developing. As the idea of 
citizenship failed and faded before the new occasions, there 
remained no inner, that is to say no real, unity in the system 
at all. Every man tended more and more to do what was right 
in his own eyes. 

Under such conditions there was no choice between chaos and 
a return to monarchy, to the acceptance of some chosen in- 
dividual as the one unifying will in the state. Of course in 
that return there is always hidden the expectation that the 
monarch will become as it were magic, will cease to be merely 
a petty human being, and will think and feel as something 
greater and more noble, as indeed a state personage; and of 
course monarchy invariably fails to satisfy that expectation. 
We shall glance at the extent of this failure in the brief review 
wo shall presently make of the emperors of Rome. We shall 
find at last one of the more constnictive of these emperors, 
Constantino the Great, conscious of his own inadequacy as a 
unifying power, turning to the faith, the organization, and 
teaching network of one of the new religious movements in 
the empire, to supply just that permeating and correlating 
factor in men's minds that was so manifestly wanting. 

With Cfesar, the civilization of Europe and Western Asia 
went back to monarchy, and, through monarchy, assisted pres- 
ently by organized Christianity, it sought to achieve peace, 
righteousness, happiness, and world order for close upon eighteen 
centuries. Then almost suddenly it began reverting to repub- 
licanism, first in one country and then in another, and, assisted 
by the new powers of printing and the press and of organized 
general education, and by the universalist religious ideas in 
which the world had been soaked for generations, it seems now 
to have resumed again the efi'ort to create a republican world- 
state and a world-wide scheme of economic righteousness which 
the Romans had made so prematurely and in which they had 
so utterly and disastrously failed. 



44'8 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




FROM TIBERIUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR 449 

Certain conditions, we are now beginning to perceive, are 
absolntely necessary to such a creation; conditions which it is 
inconceivable that any pre-Christian Roman could have regarded 
as possible. We may still think the attainment of these condi- 
tions a vastly laborious and difficult and uncertain undertaking, 
but we understand that the attempt must be made because no 
other prospect before us gives even a promise of happiness or 
self-respect or preservation of our kind. The first of these con- 
ditions is that there should be a common political idea in the 
minds of all men, an idea of the state thought of as the personal 
possession of each individual and as the backbone fact of his 
scheme of duties. In the early days of Rome, when it was a 
little visible state, twenty miles square, such notions could be 
and were developed in children in their homes, and by what 
they saw and heard of the political lives of their fathers ; but in 
a larger country such as Rome had already become before the 
war with Pyrrhus, there was a need of an organized teaching 
of the history, of the main laws, and of the general intentions 
of the state towards everyone if this moral imity was to be 
maintained. But the need was never realized, and no attempt 
at any such teaching was ever made. At the time it could 
not have been made. It is inconceivable that it could have 
been made. The knowledge was not there, and there existed 
no class from which the needed teachers could be drawn and 
no conception of an organization for any such systematic moral 
and intellectual training as the teaching organization of Chris- 
tianity, with its creeds and catechisms and sermons and con- 
firmations, presently supplied. 

Moreover, we know nowadays that even a universal education 
of this sort supplies only the basis for a healthy republican 
state. ISText to education there must come abundant, prompt, 
and truthful information of what is going on in the state, and 
frank and free discussion of the issues of the time. Even nowa- 
days these functions are performed only very imperfectly and 
badly by the press we have and by our publicists and politicians ; 
but badly though it is done, the thing is done, and the fact 
that it is done at all argues that it may ultimately be done well. 
In the Roman state it was not even attempted. The Roman 
citizen got his political facts from rumour and the occasional 
orator. He stood wedged in the forum, imperfectly hearing a 



450 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

distant speaker. He probably misconceived every issue upon 
which he voted. 

And of the monstrous ineffectiveness of the Roman voting 
system we have already written. 

Unable to sumicunt or remove these obstacles to a sane and 
effective popular government, the political instincts of the Ro- 
man mind turned towards monarchy. But it was not monarchy 
of the later European type, not hereditary monarchy, which 
was now installed in Rome. The princeps was really like an 
American war-time president, but he was elected not for four 
years but for life, he was able to appoint senators instead of 
being restrained by an elected senate, and with a rabble pop- 
ular meeting in the place of the house of representatives. He 
was also pontifex maximus, chief of the sacrificial priests, a 
function unknown at Washington; and in practice it became 
usual for him to designate and train his successor and to select 
for that honour a son or an adopted son or a near relation whom 
ho could trust. The power of the princeps was in itself enor- 
mous to entrust to the hands of a single man without any ade- 
quate checks, but it was further enhanced by the tradition of 
monarch-worship which had now spread out from Egypt over 
the entire Hellenized east, and which was coming to Rome in 
the head of every Oriental slave and immigrant. By natural 
and imperceptible degrees the idea of the god-emperor came 
to dominate the whole Romanized world. 

Only one thing presently remained to remind the god-emperor 
that he was mortal, and that was the anny. The god-emperor 
was never safe u^xin the Olympus of the Palatine Hill at Rome. 
He was only secure while he was the beloved captain of his 
legions. And as a consequence only the hardworking emperors 
who kept their legions active and in close touch with themselves 
had long reigns. The sword overhung the emperor and spurred 
him to incessant activity. If he left things to his generals, one 
of those generals presently replaced him. This spur was per- 
haps the redeeming feature of the Roman Imperial system. In 
the greater, compacter, and securer empire of China there was 
not the same need of legions, and so there was not the same 
swift end for lazy or dissipated or juvenile monarchs that over- 
took such types in Rome. 



XXVIII 

THE O^SARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT 
PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD 

§ 1. ^ SJiort Catalogue of Emperors. § 2. Boman Civiliza- 
tion at its Zenith. § 3. Limitations of the Roman Mind. 
§ 4. The Stir of the Great Plains. § 5. The Western (true 
Roman) Empire (-rumples Up. § 6. The Eastern (^revived 
Hellenic) Empire. 

§ 1 

WESTERN writei's are apt, through their patriotic pre- 
dispositions, to overestimate the organization, civiliz- 
ing work, and security of the absohite monarchy that 
established itself in Rome after the accession of Augustus (k^sar. 
From it we derive the political traditions of Britain, France, 
Spain, Germany, and Italy, and these countries loom big in the 
perspectives of European writers. By the scale of a world his- 
tory the Roman Empire ceases to seem so overwhelmingly im- 
portant. It lasted about four centuries in all before it was com- 
pletely shattered. The Byzantine Empire was no genuine con- 
tinuation of it ; it was a resumption of the Hellenic Empire of 
Alexander ; it spoke Greek ; its monarch had a Roman title no 
doubt, but so for that matter had the late Tsar of Bulgaria. 
During its four centuries of life the empire of Rome had phases 
of division and complete chaos ; its prosperous years, if they are 
gathered together and added up, do not amount in all to a 
couple of centuries. Compared with the quiet steady expan- 
sion, the security, and the civilizing task of the contemporary 
Chinese Empire, or with Egypt between 4000 and 1000 B.C., 
or with Sumeria before the Semitic conquest, this amounts to 
a mere incident in history. The Persian Empire of Cyrus 
again, which reached from the Hellespont to the Indus, had as 
high a standard of civilization ; and its homelands remained un- 
conquered and fairly prosperous for over two hundred years. 

451 



452 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Its predecessor, the Median Empire, Lad endured for half a 
century. After a brief submergence by Alexander the Great, 
it rose again as the Seleucid Empire, which endured for some 
centuries. The Seleucid dominion shrank at last to the west 
of the Euphrates, and became a part of the Koman Empire; 
but Persia, revived by the Parthians as a new Persian Empire, 
first under the Arsacids and then under the Sassanids, outlived 
the empire of Pome. The Sassanids repeatedly carried war 
into the Byzantine Empire, and held the line of the Euphrates 
steadfastly. In 616 a.d. under Chosroes II, they were holding 
Damascus, Jerusalem, and Egypt, and threatening the Helles- 
pont. But there has been no tradition to keep alive the glories 
of the Sassanids, The reputation of Rome has flourished 
through the prosperity of her heirs. The tradition of Rome 
is greater than its reality. 

History distinguishes two chief groups of Roman emperors 
who were great administrators. The first of these groups 
began with : — 

Augustus Csesar (27 b.c. to 14 a.d.), the Octavian of the 
previous section, who worked hard at the reorganization of the 
provincial governments and at financial reform. He estab- 
lished a certain tradition of lawfulness and honesty in the 
bureaucracy, and he restrained the more monstrous corruptions 
and tyrannies by giving the provincial citizen the right to ap- 
peal to Csesar, But he fixed the European boundaries of the 
empire along the Rhine and Danube, so leaving Germany, which 
is the necessary backbone of a safe and prosperous Europe, to 
barbarism ; and he made a similar limitation in the east at the 
Euphrates, leaving Armenia independent, to be a constant bone 
of contention with the Arsacids and Sassanids. It is doubtful 
whether he considered that he was fixing the final boundaries 
of the empire along these lines, or whether he thought it desir- 
able to consolidate for some years before any further attempts 
at expansion. 

Tiberius (14 to 37 a.d.) is also described as a capable niler, 
but he became intensely unpopular in Rome, and it would seem 
that he was addicted to gross and abominable vices. But his 
indulgence in these and his personal tyrannies and cruelties did 
not interfere with the general prosperity of the empire. It is 
difficult to judge him ; nearly all our sources of information are 
manifestly hostile to him. 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 453 




454 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Caligula (37 to 41 a.d.) was insane, but the empire carried 
on during four years of eccentricity at its head. Finally he 
was murdered in his palace by his servants, and there seems to 
have been an attempt to restore the senatorial government, an 
attempt which was promptly suppressed by the household 
legions. 

Claudius (41 to 54 a.d.), the uncle of Caligula, upon whom 
the choice of the soldiers fell, was personally uncouth, but he 
seems to have been a hardworking and fairly capable admin- 
istrator. He advanced the westward boundary of the empire by 
annexing the southern half of Britain. He was poisoned by 
Agrippina, the mother of his adopted son, Nero, and a woman 
of great charm and force of character. 

isTero (54 to 68 a.d.), like Tiberius, is credited with mon- 
strous vices and cruelties, but the empire had acquired sufficient 
momentum to carry on through his fourteen years of power. 
He certainly murdered his devoted but troublesome mother and 
his wife, the latter as a mark of devotion to a lady, Poppsea, 
who then married him; but the domestic infelicities of the 
Csesars are no part of our present story. The reader greedy 
for criminal particulars must go to the classical source, Sue- 
tonius. These various Ca?sars and their successors and their 
womenkind were probably no worse essentially than most weak 
and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion, 
being themselves gods ; they had no wide knowledge on which 
to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and often 
illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom. 
They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their 
slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impules into 
action. What are mere passing black thoughts and 
angry impulses with most of us became therefore deeds 
with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a different 
species of being from himself, he should examine his own secret 
thoughts very carefully. Nero became intensely unpopular in 
Rome, and it is interesting to note that he became unpopular 
not because he murdered and poisoned his intimate relations, 
but because there was an insurrection in Britain under a 
certain Queen Boadicea, and the Roman forces suffered a great 
disaster (61 a.d.), and because there was a destructive earth- 
quake in Southern Italy. The Roman population, true to its 
Etruscan streak, never religious and always superstitious, did 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 455 

not mind a wicked Caesar, but it did object strongly to an 
unpropitions one. The Spanish legions rose in insurrection 
under an elderly general of seventy-three, Galba, whom they 
acclaimed emperor. He advanced upon Rome carried in 
a litter. Nero, hopeless of support, committed suicide 

(68 A.D.). 

Galba, however, was only one of a group of would-be em- 
perors. The generals in command of the Khine legions, the 
Palatine troops, and the eastern armies, each attempted to 
seize power. Rome saw four emperors in a year, Galba, Otho, 
Vitellus, and Vespasian; the fourth, Vespasian (60-79 a.d.), 
from the eastern command, had the firmest grip, and held and 
kept the prize. But with Nero the line of Ca-sars born or 
adopted ended. Csesar ceased to be the family name of the 
Roman emperors and became a title, Divus C«sar, the Caesar 
god. The monarchy took a step forward towards orientalism by 
an increased insistence upon the worship of the ruler. 

Vespasian (69 to 79 a.d.) and his sons Titus (79 a.d.) and 
Domitian (81 a.d.) constitute, as it were, a second dynasty, 
the Flavian; then after the assassination of Domitian came 
a group of emperors related to one another not by blood, but 
by adoption, the adoptive emperors. Nerva (96 a.d.) was the 
first of this line, and Trajan (98 a.d.) the second. They were 
followed by the indefatigable Hadrian (117 a.d.), Antoninus 
Pius (138 A.D.), and Marcus Aurelius (161 to 180 a.d.). 
Under both the Flavians and the Antonines the boun- 
daries of the empire crept forward again. North Britain 
was annexed in 84 a.d., the angle of the Rhine and 
Danube was filled in, and what is now Transylvania was made 
into a new province, Dacia. Trajan also invaded Parthia 
and annexed Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. Under his 
rule the empire reached its maximum extent. Hadrian, his 
successor, was of a cautious and retractile disposition. He aban- 
doned these new eastern conquests of Trajan's, and he also 
abandoned North Britain. He adopted the Chinese idea of 
the limiting wall against barbarism, an excellent idea so long 
as the pressure of population on the imperial side of the wall 
is greater than the pressure from without, but worthless other- 
wise. He built Hadrian's wall across Britain, and a palisade 
between the Rhine and the Danube. The full tide of Roman 
expansion was past, and in the reigii of his successor the North 



456 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

European frontier was already actively on the defensive against 
the aggression of Teutonic and Slavic tribes. 

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is one of those figures in history 
about which men differ widely and intensely. To some critics 
he seems to have been a priggish person; he dabbled in re- 
ligions, and took a pleasure in conducting priestly ceremonies 
in priestly garments — a disposition offensive to common men 
— and they resent his alleged failure to restrain the wickedness 
of his wife Faustina. The stories of his domeetic infelicity, 
however, rest on no very good foundations, though certainly 
his son Commodus was a startling person for a good home to 
produce. On the other hand, he was unquestionably a devoted 
and industrious emperor, holding social order together through 
a series of disastrous years of vile weather, great floods, failing 
harvests and famine, barbaric raids and revolts, and at last a 
terrible universal pestilence. Says F. W. Farrar, quoted in the 
Encydopcedia Britannica, "He regarded himself as being, in 
fact, the seiwant of all. The registry of the citizens, the sup- 
pression of litigation, the elevation of public morals, the care 
of minors, the retrenchment of public expenses, the limitation 
of gladiatorial games and shows, the care of roads, the restora- 
tion of senatorial privileges, the appointment of none but worthy 
magistrates, even the regulation of street traffic, these and 
numberless other duties so completely absorbed his attention 
that, in spite of indifferent health, they often kept him at 
severe labour from early morning till long after midnight. His 
position, indeed, often necessitated his presence at games and 
shows; but on these occasions he occupied himself either in 
reading, or being read to, or in writing notes. He was one 
of those who held that nothing should be done hastily, and 
that few crimes were worse than waste of time." 

But it is not by these industries that he is now remembered. 
He was one of the greatest exponents of the Stoical philosophy, 
and in his Meditations, jotted down in camp and court, he has 
put so much of a human soul on record as to raise up for 
himself in each generation a fresh series of friends and admirers. 

With the death of Marcus Aurelius this phase of unity and 
comparatively good government came to an end, and his son 
Commodus inaugurated an age of disorder. Practically the 
empire had been at peace within itself for two hundred years. 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 457 

I^ow for a hundred years the student of Roman history must 
master the various criminology of a number of inadequate em- 
perors, while the frontier crumbled and receded under bar- 
barian pressure. One or two names only seem to be the names 
of able men : such were Septimius Severus, Aurelian, and Pro- 
bus. Scptimius Severus was a Carthaginian, and his sister 
was never able to master Latin. She conducted her Roman 
household in the Punic language, which must have made Cato 
the elder turn in his grave. The rest of the emperors of this 
period were chiefly adventurers too unimpoi-tant to the general 
scheme of things for us to note. At times there were separate 
emperors ruling in different parts of the distracted empire. 
From our present point of view the Emperor Decius, who was 
defeated and killed during a great raid of the Goths into 
Thrace in 251 a.d., and the Emperor Valerian, who, together 
with the great city of Antioch, was captured by the Sassanid 
Shah of Persia in 260 a.d., are worthy of notice because they 
mark the insecurity of the whole Roman system, and the char- 
acter of the outer pressure upon it. So, too, is Claudius, "the 
Conqueror of the Goths," because he gained a great victory 
over these people at Nish in Serbia (270 a.d.), and because he 
died, like Pericles, of the plagiie. 

Through all these centuries intermittent pestilences were 
playing a part in weakening races and altering social condi- 
tions, a part that has still to be properly worked out by histo- 
rians. There was, for instance, a great plague throughout the 
empire between the years 164 and 180 a.d. in the reign of the 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It probably did much to disor- 
ganize social life and prepare the way for the troubles that fol- 
lowed the accession of Commodus. This same pestilence dev- 
astated China, as we shall note in § 4 of this chapter. Con- 
siderable fluctuations of climate had also been going on in the 
first and second centuries, producing stresses and shiftings of 
population, whose force historians have still to appraise. But 
before we go on to tell o± the irruptions of the barbarians and 
the attempts of such later emperors as Diocletian (284 a.d.) 
and Constantine the Great (312 a.d.) to hold together the heav- 
ing and splitting vessel of the state, we must describe something 
of the conditions of human life in the Roman Empire during 
its two centuries of prosperity. 



458 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



The impatient reader of history may be disposed to count 
the two centuries of order between 27 b.c. and 180 a.d. as 
among the wasted opportunities of mankind. It was an age 
of spending rather than of creation, an age of architecture and 
trade in which the rich grew richer and the poor poorer and 
the soul and spirit of man decayed. Looked at superficially, 
as a man might have looked at it from an aeroplane a couple 
of thousand feet in the air, there was a considerable flourish 
of prosperity. Everywhere, from York to Cyrene and from 
Lisbon to Antioch, he would have noted large and well-built 
cities, with temples, theatres, amphitheatres, markets, and the 
like ; thousands of such cities, supplied by gi-eat aqueducts and 
served by splendid high roads, whose stately remains astonish 
us to this day. He would have noted an abundant cultivation, 
and have soared too high to discover that this cultivation was 
the grudging work of slaves. Upon the Mediterranean and the 
Red Sea a considerable traffic would be visible ; and the sight of 
two ships alongside each other would not at that altitude reveal 
the fact that one was a pirate and plundering the other. 

And even if the observer came down to a closer scrutiny, 
there would still be much accumulated improvement to note. 
There had been a softening of manners and a general refinement 
since the days of Julius Csesar. With this there had been a 
real increase of humane feeling. During the period of the 
Antonines, laws for the protection of slaves from extreme cruelty 
came into exic^tence, and it was no longer permissible to sell them 
to the gladiatorial schools. Not only were the cities outwardly 
more splendidly built, but within the homes of the wealthy 
there had been great advances in the art of decoration. The 
gross feasting, animal indulgence, and vulgar display of the 
earlier days of Eoman prosperity were now tempered by a 
certain refinement. Dress had become richer, finer, and more 
beautiful. There was a great trade in silk with remote China, 
for the mulberry-tree and the silkworm had not yet begun to 
move west. By the time silk had ended its long and varied 
journey to Rome it was worth its weight in gold. Yet it was 
used abundantly, and there was a steady flow of the precious 
metals eastward in exchange. There had been very considerable 
advances in gastronomy and the arts of entertainment. Petro- 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 459 

nius describes a feast given by a wealthy man under the early 
Csesars, a remarkable succession of courses, some delicious, some 
amazing, exceeding anything that even the splendours and 
imagination of modern New York could produce ; and the 
festival was varied by music and by displays of tight-rope 
dancing, juggling, Homeric recitations, and the like. There 
was a considerable amount of what we may describe as "rich 
men's culture" throughout the empire. Books were far more 
plentiful than they had been before the time of the Csesars. 
Men prided themselves upon their libraries, even when the cares 
and responsibilities of property made them too busy to give 
their literary treasures much more than a passing examination. 
The knowledge of Greek spread eastward and of Latin west- 
ward, and if the prominent men of this or that British or 
Gallic city lacked any profound Greek culture themselves, they 
could always turn to some slave or other, whose learning had 
been guaranteed of the highest quality by the slave-dealer, to 
supply the deficiency. 

The generation of Cato had despised Greeks and the Greek 
language, but now all that was changed. The prestige of Greek 
learning of an approved and settled type was as high in the 
Rome of Antoninus Pius as it was in the Oxford and Cam- 
bridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar received the 
same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical contempt. 
There was a very considerable amount of Greek scholarship, 
and of written criticism and commentary. Indeed there was so 
great an admiration for Greek letters as almost completely 
to destroy the Greek spirit ; and the recorded observations of 
Aristotle were valued so highly as to preclude any attempt to 
imitate his organization of further inquiry. It is noteworthy 
that while Aristotle in the original Greek fell like seed upon 
stony soil in the Roman world, he was, in Syrian and Arabic 
translations, immensely stimulating to the Arabic civilization 
of a thousand years later. I^or were the aesthetic claims of 
Latin neglected in this heyday of Greek erudition. As Greece 
had her epics and so forth, the Romans felt that they, too, must 
have their epics. The age of Augustus was an age of imitative 
literature. Virgil in the JEneid set himself modestly but reso- 
lutely, and with an elegant sort of successfulness, to parallel 
the Odyssey and Iliad. 

All this wide-spread culture of the wealthy householder is to 



460 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the credit of the early Koman Empire, and Gibbon makes the 
most of it in the sunny review of the age of the Antouines with 
which he opens his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His 
design for that great work demanded a prehide of S'plendour and 
tranquillity. But he was far too shrewd and subtle not to 
qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he describes. 
''Under the Roman Empire," he writes, ''the labour of an in- 
dustrious and ingenious people was variously but incessantly 
employed in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, 
their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united 
every refinement of convenience, of elegance, and of splendour, 
whatever could soothe their pride, or gratify their sensuality. 
Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been 
severely arraigned by the moralists of every age ; and it might 
perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness, 
of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the super- 
fluities of life. But in the present imperfect condition of 
society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems 
to be the only means that can correct the unequal distribution 
of property. The diligent mechanic and the skilful artist, 
who have obtained no share in'the division of the earth, receive 
a voluntary tax from the possessors of land ; and the latter are 
prompted, by a sense of interest, to improve those estates, with 
whose produce they may purchase additional pleasure. This 
operation, the particular effects of which are felt in every soci- 
ety, acted with much more difl^use energy in the Roman world. 
The provinces would soon have been exhausted of their wealth, 
if the manufactures and commerce of luxury had not insen- 
sibly restored to the industrious subjects the sums which were 
exacted from them by the arms and authority of Rome." 
And so on, with a sting of satire in every fold of the florid 
description. 

If we look a little more widely than a hovering aeroplane can 
do at the movement of races upon the earth, or a little more 
closely than an inspection of streets, amphitheatres, and ban- 
quets goes, into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find 
that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely 
the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and 
things within, and blind to the future. If, for instance, we 
compare the two centuries of Roman ascendancy and opportu- 
nity, the first and second centuries a.d., with the two centuries 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 461 

of Greek and Hellenic life beginning about 4(36 b.c. with the 
supremacy of Pericles in Athens, we are amazed by — we can- 
not call it an inferiority, it is a complete absence of science. The 
incuriousness of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more 
massive and monumental even than their architecture. 

In one field of knowledge particularly we might have ex- 
pected the Romans to have been alert and enterprising, and 
that was geography. Their political interests demanded a 
steadfast inquiry into the state of affairs beyond their fron- 
tiers, and yet that inquiry was never made. There is prac- 
tically no literature of Roman travel beyond the imperial limits, 
no such keen and curious accounts as Herodotus gives of the 
Scythians, the Africans, and the like. There is nothing in 
Latin to compare with the early descriptions of India and 
Siberia that are to be found in Chinese. The Roman legions 
went at one time into Scotland, yet there remains no really 
intelligent account of Picts or Scots, much less any glance 
at the seas beyond. Such explorations as those of Planno or 
Pharaoh Necho seem to have been altogether beyond the scope 
of the Roman imagination. It is probable that after the de- 
stiniction of Carthage the amount of shipping that went out 
into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar fell to incon- 
siderable proportions. Still more impossible in this world of 
vulgar wealth, enslaved intelligence, and bureaucratic rule was 
any further development of the astronomy and physiography of 
Alexandria. The Romans do not seem even to have inquired 
what manner of men wove the silk and prepared the spices or 
collected the amber and the pearls that came into their mar- 
kets. Yet the channels of inquiry were open and easy; path- 
ways led in every direction to the most convenient "jumping-off 
places" for explorers it is possible to imagine. 

"The most remote countries of the ancient world were ran- 
sacked to supply the pomp and delicacy of Rome. The forests 
of Scythia afforded some valuable furs. Amber was brought 
overland from the shores of the Baltic to the Danube, and the 
barbarians were astonished at the price which they received in 
exchange for so useless a commodity. There was a considerable 
demand for Babylonian carpets and other manufactures of the 
East ; but the most important branch of foreign trade was car- 
ried on with Arabia and India. Every year, about the time of 
the summer solstice, a fleet of a hundred and twenty vessels 



46^ THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

sailed from Myos-hormos, a port of Egypt on the Red Sea. By 
the periodical assistance of the monsoons, they traversed the 
ocean in about forty days. The coast of Malabar, or the island 
of Ceylon, was the usual term of their navigation, and it was 
in those markets that the merchants from the more remote 
countries of Asia expected their arrival. The return of the 
fleet to Egypt was fixed to the months of December or January, 
and as soon as their rich cargo had been transported, on the 
backs of camels, from the Red Sea to the Nile, and had de- 
scended that river as far as Alexandria, it was poured, without 
delay, into the capital of the empire." ^ 

Yet Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch 
its gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn 
anything of India, China, Persia or Scythia, Buddha or Zoro- 
aster, or about the Huns, the ISTegroes, the people of Scandi- 
navia, or the secrets of the western sea. 

When we realize the uninspiring quality of the social atmos- 
phere which made this indifference possible, we are able to 
account for the failure of Rome during its age of opportunity 
to develop any physical or chemical science, and as a conse- 
quence to gain any increased control over matter. Most of the 
physicians in Rome were Greeks and many of them slaves — for 
the Roman wealthy did not even understand that a bought mind 
is a spoilt mind. Yet this was not due to any want of natural 
genius among the Roman people; it was due entirely to their 
social and economic conditions. From the Middle x\ges to the 
present day Italy has produced a great number of brilliant 
scientific men. And one of the most shrewd and inspired of 
scientific writers was an Italian, Lucretius, who lived between 
the time of Marius and Julius Csesar (about 100 b.c. to about 
55 B.C.). This amazing man was of the quality of Leonardo da 
Vinci (also an Italian) or l^ewton. He wrote a long Latin poem 
about the processes of Nature, De Rerum Naturia, in which he 
guessed with astonishing insight about the constitution of matr 
ter and about the early history of mankind. Osbom in his Old 
Stone Age quotes with admiration long passages from Lucretius 
about primitive man, so good and true are they to-day. But this 
was an individual display, a seed that bore no fruit. Roman 
science was still-bom into a suffocating atmosphere of vile 
wealth and military oppression. The true figure to represent 
* Gibbon. 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 463 

the classical Roman attitude tO' science is not Lucretius, but 
that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes to death at the 
storming of Syracuse. 

And if physical and biological science wilted and died on 
the stony soil of Roman prosperity, political and social science 
never had a chance to germinate. Political discussion would 
have been treason to the emperor, social or •economic inquiry 
would have threatened the rich. So Rome, until disaster fell 
upon her, never examined into her own social health, never 
questioned the ultimate value of her hard officialism. Conse- 
quently, there was no one who realized the gravity of her failure 
to develop any intellectual imagination to hold her empire 
together, any general education in common ideas that would 
make men fight and work for the empire as men will fight and 
work for a dear possession. But the rulers of the Roman 
Empire did not want their citizens to fight for anything in any 
spirit at all. The rich had eaten the heart out of their general 
population, and they were content with the meal they had 
made. The legions were filled with Germans, Britons, Numid- 
ians, and the like ; and until the very end the wealthy Romans . 
thought they could go on buying barbarians to defend them 
against the enemy without and the rebel poor within. How 
little was done in education by the Romans is showai by an 
account of what was done. Says Mr, H. Stuart Jones, "Julius 
Ca?sar bestowed Roman citizenship on 'teachers of the liberal 
arts' ; Vespasian endowed professorships of Greek and Latin 
oratory at Rome; and later emperors, especially Antoninus 
Pius, extended the same benefits to the provinces. Local enter- 
prise and munificence were also devoted to the cause of educa- 
tion; we learn from the correspondence of the younger Pliny 
that public schools were founded in the towns of Northern Italy. 
But though there was a wide diffusion of knowledge under the 
empire, there was no true intellectual progress. Augustus, it is 
true, gathered about him the most brilliant writers of his 
time, and the debut of the new monarchy coincided with the 
Golden Age of Roman literature ; but this was of brief duration, 
and the beginnings of the Christian era saw the triumph of 
classicism and the first steps in the decline which awaits all 
literary movements which look to the past rather than the 
future'." 

There is a diagnosis of the intellectual decadence of the age 



464 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

in a treatise upon the sublime by a Greek writer who wrote 
somewhen in the second, third, or fourth century a.d., and 
who may possibly have been Longinus Philologus, which states 
very distinctly one manifest factor in the mental sickness of the 
Roman world. He is cited by Gibbon : "The sublime Longinus, 
who, in somewhat a later period and in the court of a Syrian 
queen, Zenobia, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, ob- 
serv^es and laments the degeneracy of his contemporaries, which 
debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed 
their talents. 'In the same manner,' says he, 'as some children 
always remain pig-mies, whose infant limbs have been too closely 
confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and 
habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves or 
to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in 
the ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote 
with all the same freedom as they acted.' " 

But this critic gi-asped only one aspect of the restraints 
upon mental activity. The leading-strings that kept the Roman 
mind in a permanent state of infantilism constituted a double 
servitude ; they were economic as well as political. The account 
Gibbon gives of the life and activities of a certain Ilerodes 
Atticus, who lived in the time of Hadrian, shows just how 
little was the share of the ordinary citizen in the outward mag- 
nificence of the time. This Atticus had an immense fortune, 
and he amused himself by huge architectural benefactions to 
various cities. Athens was given a racecourse, and a theatre of 
cedar, curiously carved, was set up there to the memory of his 
wife ; a theatre was built at Corinth, a racecourse was given to 
Delphi, baths to Thermopylse, an aqueduct to Canusium, and so 
on and so on. One is struck by the spectacle of a world of 
slaves and common people who were not consulted and over 
whose heads, without any participation on their part, this rich 
man indulged in his displays of "taste." Numerous inscrip- 
tions in Greece and Asia still preserve the name of Herodes 
Atticus, "patron and benefactor," who ranged about the empire 
as though it was his private garden, commemorating himself 
by these embellishments. He did not confine himself to splendid 
buildings. He was also a philosopher, though none of his wis- 
dom has survived. He had a large villa near Athens, and there 
philosophers were welcome guests so long as they convinced their 
patron of the soundness of their pretensions, received his dis- 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 465 

courses witii respect, and did not offend him by insolent 
controversy. 

The world, it is evident, was not progressing during tli6se two 
centuries of Roman prosperity. But was it liappy in its stagna- 
tion ? There are signs of a very unmistakable sort that the 
great mass of human beings in the empire, a mass numbering 
something between a hundred and a hundred and fifty millions, 
was not happy, was probably very acutely miserable, beneath 
its outward mag-nificence. True there were no great wars and 
conquests within the empire, little of famine or fire or sword 
to afflict mankind ; but, on the other hand, there was a terrible 
restraint by government, and still more by the property of 
the rich, upon the free activities of nearly everyone. Life for 
the great majority who were neither rich nor official, nor the 
womankind and the parasites of the rich and official, must have 
been laborious, tedious, and lacking in interest and freedom 
to a degTee that a modem mind can scarcely imagine. 

Three things in particular may be cited to sustain the opinion 
that this period was a period of widespread unhappiness. The 
first of these is the extraordinary apathy of the population to 
political events. They saw one upstart pretender to empire 
succeed another with complete indifference. Such things did 
not seem to matter to them ; hope had gone. When presently 
the barbarians poured into the empire, there was nothing but the 
legions to face them. There was no popular uprising against 
them at all. Everywhere the barbarians must ^ "^e been out- 
numbered if only the people had resisted. But the pt,v.ple did 
not resist. It is manifest that to the bulk of its inhabitants the 
Roman Empire did not seem to be a thing worth fighting for. 
To the slaves and common people the barbarian probably seemed 
to promise more freedom and less indignity than the pompous 
rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the 
rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional 
massacre did not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it 
shocked the wealthy and cultured people to whom we owe such 
accounts as wo have of the breaking down of the imperial sys- 
tem. Great numbers of slaves and common people probably 
joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic 
prejudices, and were openhandcd to any promising recruit. No 
doubt in many cases the population found that the barbarian 
was a worse infliction even than the tax-gatherer and the slave- 



466 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

driver. But that discovery came too late for resistance or tlie 
restoration, of the old order. 

And as a second symptom that points to the same conclusion 
that life was hardly worth living for the poor and the slaves and 
the majority of people during the age of the Antonines, we 
must reckon the steady depopulation of the empire. People 
refused to have children. They did so, we suggest, because 
their homes were not safe from oppression, because in the case 
of slaves there was no security that the husband and wife would 
not be separated, because there was no pride nor reasonable 
hope in children any more. In modern states the great breed- 
ing-ground has always been the agricultural countryside where 
there is a more or less secure peasantry ; but under the Roman 
Empire the peasant and the small cultivator was either a wor- 
ried debtor, or he was held in a network of restraints that made 
him a spiritless serf, or he had been ousted altogether by the 
gang production of slaves. 

A third indication that this outwardly flourishing period was 
one of deep unhappiness and mental distress for vast multitudes, 
is to be found in the spread of new religious movements through- 
out the population. We have seen how in the case of the little 
countiy of Judea a whole nation may be infected by the persua- 
sion that life is unsatisfactory and wrong, and that something 
is needed to set it right. The mind of the Jews, as we know, 
had crystallized about the idea of the Promise of the One True 
God and the coming of a Saviour or Messiah. Rather different 
ideas from these were spreading through the Roman Empire. 
They were but varying answers to one universal question : 
"What must we do for salvation ?" A frequent and natural 
consequence of disgust with life as it is, is to throw the imagina- 
tion forward to an after-life, which is to redeem all the miseries 
and injustices of this one. The belief in such compensation is 
a great opiate for present miseries. Egyptian religion had long 
been saturated with anticipations of immortality, and we have 
seen how central was that idea to the cult of Serapis and Isis 
at Alexandria. The ancient mysteries of Demeter and Orpheus, 
the mysteries of the Mediterranean race, revived and made a 
sort of tlieocrasia- with these new cults. 

A second great religious movement was Mithraism, a de- 
velopment of Zoroastrianism, a religion of very ancient Aryan 
origin, traceable back to the Indo-Iranian people before they 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 467 

split into Persians and Hindus. We cannot here examine its 
mysteries in any detail.^ Mithras was a god of light, a Sun 
of Eighteousness, and in the shrines of the cult he was always 
represented as slaying a sacred bull whose blood was the seed of 
life. Suffice it that, complicated with many added ingredients, 
this worship of Mithras came into the Eoman Empire about 
the time of Pompey the Great, and began to spread very widely 
under the Csesars and Antonines. Like the Isis religion, it 
promised immortality. Its followers were mainly slaves, sol- 
diers, and distressed people. In its methods of worship, in the 
burning of candles before the altar and so forth, it had a certain 
superficial resemblance to the later developments of the ritual 
of the third great religious movement in the Roman world, 
Christianity. 

Christianity also was a doctrine of immortality and salvation, 
and it, too, spread at first chiefly among the lowly and unhappy. 
Christianity has been denounced by modern writers as a ''slave 
religion." It was. It took the slaves and the downtrodden, and 
it gave them hope and restored their self-respect, so that they 
stood up for righteousness like men and faced persecution and 
torment. But of the origins and quality of Christianity we will 
tell more fully in a later chapter, 

§ 3 

We have already shown reason for our statement that the 
Roman imperial system was a very unsound political growth 
indeed. It is absurd to write of its statecraft ; it had none. At 
its best it had a bureaucratic administration which kept the 
peace of the world for a time and failed altogether to secure it. 

Let us note here the main factors in its failure. 

The clue to all its failure lies in the absence of any free 
mental activity and any organization for the increase, develop- 
ment, and application of knowledge. It respected wealth and 
it despised science. It gave government to the rich, and im- 
agined that wise men could be bought and bargained for in the 
slave markets when they were needed. It was, therefore, a 
colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire. It foresaw 
nothing. 

It had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant 
^ See Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity. 



468 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions 
of Russia, Central Asia, and the East. It was content to keep 
the Ehine and Danube as its boundaries, and to make no effort 
to Romanize Germany. But we need only look at the map of 
Europe and Asia showing the Roman Empire to see that a will- 
ing and incorporated Germany was absolutely essential to the 
life and security of Western Europe. Excluded, Germany be- 
came a wedge that needed only the impact of the Hunnish ham- 
mer to split up the whole system. 

Moreover, this neglect to push the boundaries northward to 
the Baltic left that sea and the North Sea as a region of ex- 
periment and training and instruction in seamanship for the 
JSTorthmen of Scandinavia, Denmark, and the Frisian coast. 
But Rome went on its way quite stupidly, oblivious to the growth 
of a newer and more powerful piracy in the north. 

The same" unimaginative quality made the Romans leave the 
seaways of the Mediterranean undeveloped. When presently 
the barbarians pressed down to the warm water, we read of no 
swift transport of armies from Spain or Africa or Asia to the 
rescue of Italy and the Adriatic coasts. Instead, we see the 
Vandals becoming masters of the western Mediterranean with- 
out so much as a naval battle. 

The Romans had been held at the Euphrates by an array of 
mounted archers. It was clear that as the legion was organized 
it was useless in wide open country, and it should have been 
equally clear that sooner or later the mounted nomads of east 
Germany, south Russia or Parthia were bound to try conclu- 
sions with the empire. But the Romans, two hundred years 
after Ca:>sar's time, were still marching about, the same drilled 
and clanking cohorts they had always been, easily ridden round 
and shot to pieces. The empire had learnt nothing even from 
Carrhse. 

The incapacity of the Roman imperialism for novelty in 
methods of transport again is amazing. It was patent that their 
power and unity depended upon the swift movement of troops 
and supplies from one part of the empire to another. The re- 
public made magnificent roads; the empire never improved 
upon them. Four hundred years before the Antonines, Hero 
of Alexandria had made the first steam-engine. Beautiful 
records of such beginnings of science were among the neglected 
treasures of the rich men's libraries throughout the imperial 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 469 

domains. They were seed lying on stony ground. The armies 
and couriers of Marcus Aurelius drudged along the roads ex- 
actly as the armies of Scipio Africanus had done three centuries 
before them. 

The Roman writers were always lamenting the effeminacy 
of the age. It was their favourite cant. They recognized that 
the free men of the forest and steppes and desert were harder 
and more desperate fighters than their citizens, but the natural 
corollary of developing the industrial power of their accumula- 
tions of population to make a countervailing equipment never 
entered their heads. Instead they took the barbarians into 
their legions, taught them the arts of war, marched them about 
the empire, and returned them, with their lesson well learnt, 
to their own people. 

In view of these obvious negligences, it is no wonder that 
the Romans disregarded that more subtle thing, the soul of the 
empire, altogether, and made no effort to teach or train or win 
its common people into any conscious participation with its 
life. Such teaching or training would indeed have iTin counter 
to all the ideas of the rich men and the imperial officials. They 
had made a tool of religion; science, literature, and education 
they had entrusted to the care of slaves, who were bred and 
trained and sold like dogs or horses; ignorant, pompous, and 
base, the Roman adventurers of finance and property who cre- 
ated the empire, lorded it with a sense of the utmost security 
while their destruction gathered without the empire and within. 

By the second and third centuries a.d. the overtaxed and 
overstrained imperial machine was already staggering towards 
its downfall. 

§ 4 

And now it is necessary, if we are to understand clearly the 
true situation of the Roman Empire, to turn our eyes to the 
world beyond its northern and eastern borders, the world of 
the plains, that stretches, with scarcely a break, from Holland 
across Germany and Russia to the mountains of Central Asia 
and Mongolia, and to give a little attention to the parallel em- 
pire in China that was now consolidating and developing a 
far tougher and more enduring moral and intellectual unity 
than the Romans ever achieved. 



470 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

"It is the practice," says Mr, E. H. Parker, "even amongst 
our most highly educated men in Europe, to deliver sonorous 
sentences about being 'masters of the world,' 'bringing all na- 
tions of the earth under her sway,' and so on, when in reality 
only some corner of the Mediterranean is involved, or some 
ephemeral sally into Persia and Gaul. Cyrus and Alexander, 
Darius and Xerxes, Csesar and Pompey, all made very interest- 
ing excursions, but they were certainly not on a larger scale 
or charged with greater human interest than the campaigns 
which were going on at the other end of Asia. Western civiliza- 
tion possessed much in art and science for which China never 
cared, but, on the other hand, the Chinese developed a historical 
and critical literature, a courtesy of demeanour, a luxury of 
clothing, and an administrative system of which Europe might 
have been proud. In one word, the history of the Far East is 
quite as interesting as that of the Far West. It only requires 
to be able to read it. When we brush away contemptuously 
from our notice the tremendous events which took place on the 
plains of Tartary, we must not blame the Chinese too much for 
declining to interest themselves in the doings of what to them 
appear insignificant states dotted round the Mediterranean and 
Caspian, which, at this time, was practically all the world of 
which we knew in Europe." ^ 

We have already mentioned (in Chap. XIV and elsewhere) 
the name of Shi Hwang-ti, who consolidated an empire much 
smaller, indeed, than the present limits of China, but still 
very great and populous, spreading from the valleys of the 
Hwang-ho and the Yang-tse. He became king of Ch'in in 246 
B.C. and emperor in 220 B.C., and he reigned until 210 B.C., 
and during this third of a century he effected much the same 
work of consolidation that Augustus Ca>sar carried out in Rome 
two centuries later. At his death there was dynastic trouble 
for four years, and then (206 b.c.) a fresh dynasty, the Han, 
established itself and ruled for two hundred and twenty-nine 
years. The opening quarter century of the Christian era was 
troubled by a usurper; then what is called the Later Han 
Dynasty recovered power and ruled for another century and a 
half until China, in the time of the Antonines, was so dev- 
astated by an eleven-year pestilence as to fall into disorder. 
This same pestilence, we may note, also helped to produce a 
* E. H. Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars. 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 471 




472 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

century of confusion in the Western world (see § 1). But 
altogether until this happened, for more than four hundred 
years Central China was generally at peace, and on the whole 
well governed, a cycle of strength and prosperity unparalleled 
by anything in the experience of the Western world. 

Only the first of the Ilan monarchs continued the policy of 
Shi Hwang-ti against the lU'erati. His successor restored the 
classics, for the old separatist tradition was broken, and in the 
uniformity of learning throughout the empire lay, he saw, the 
cement of Chinese unity. While the Roman world was still 
blind to the need of any universal mental organization, the Han 
emperors were setting up a uniform system of education and 
of literary degTces throughout China that has maintained the 
intellectual solidarity of that great and always expanding coun- 
try into modern times. The bureaucrats of Rome were of the 
most miscellaneous origins and traditions; the bureaucrats of 
China were, and are still, made in the same mould, all mem- 
bers of one tradition. Since the Han days China has experi- 
enced gTeat vicissitudes of political fortune, but they have never 
changed her fundamental character ; she has been divided, but 
she has always recovered her unity ; she has been conquered, 
and she has always absorbed and assimilated her conquerors. 

But from our present point of view, the most important conse- 
quences of this consolidation of China under Shi Hwang-ti and 
the Hans was in its reaction upon the unsettled tribes of the 
northern and western border of China. Throughout the disor- 
dered centuries before the time of Shi Hwang-ti, the Hiung- 
nu or Huns had occupied Mongolia and large portions of JSTorth- 
ern China, and had raided freely into China and interfered 
freely in Chinese politics. The new power and organization of 
the Chinese civilization began to change this state of affairs 
for good and all. 

We have already, in our first account of Chinese beginnings, 
noted the existence of these Huns. It is necessary now to ex- 
plain briefly who and what they were. Even in using this word 
Hun as a general equivalent for the Hiung-nu, we step on to 
controversial gTound. In our accounts of the development of 
the Western world we have had occasion to name the Scythians, 
and to explain the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between 
Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Goths, 
and other more or less nomadic, more or less Aryan peoples 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 473 

who drifted to and fro in a great arc between the Danube and 
Central Asia. While sections of the Aryans were moving south 
and acquiring and developing civilization, these other Aryan 
peoples were developing mobility and nomadism ; they were 
learning the life of the tent, the wagon, and the herd. They 
were learning also to use milk as a food basis, and were prob- 
ably becoming less agricultural, less disposed to take even 
snatch crops, than they had been. Their development was 
being aided by a slow change in climate that was replacing the 
swamps and forests and parklands of South Russia and Central 
Asia by steppes, by wide grazing lands that is, which 
favoured a healthy, unsettled life, and necessitated an an- 
nual movement between summer and winter pasture. These 
peoples had only the lowest political forms; they split up, 
they mingled together; the various races had identical social 
habits ; and so it is that the difficulty, the impossibility of sharp 
distinctions between them arises. Now the case of the Mon- 
golian races to the north and north-west of the Chinese civiliza- 
tion is very parallel. There can be little doubt that the Hiung- 
nu, the Huns, and the later people called the Mongols, were 
all very much the same people, and that the Turks and Tartars 
presently branched off from this same drifting Mongolian popu- 
lation. Kalmucks and Buriats are later developments of the 
same strain. Here we shall favour the use of the word "Hun" 
as a sort of general term for these tribes, just as we have been 
free and wide in our use of "Scythian" in the West. 

The consolidation of China was a very serious matter for 
these Hunnish peoples. Hitherto their overflow of population 
had gone adventuring southward into the disorders of divided 
China as water goes into a sponge. Now they found a wall 
built against them, a firm government, and disciplined armies 
cutting them off from the grass plains. And though the wall 
held them back, it did not hold back the Chinese. They were 
increasing and multiplying through these centuries of peace, 
and as they increased and multiplied, they spread steadily with 
house and plough wherever the soil permitted. They spread 
westward into Tibet and northward and north-westwardly, per- 
haps to the edge of the Gobi desert. They spread into the homes 
and pasturing and hunting-grounds of the Hunnish nomads, 
exactly as the white people of the United States spread west- 
ward into the hunting-grounds of the Eed Indians. And in 



474 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

spite of raid and massacre, they were just as invincible because 
they had the pressure of numbers and a strong' avenging- gov- 
ernment behind them. Even v^^ithout the latter support the 
cultivating civilization of China has enormous powers of 
permeation and extension. It has spread slowly and continu- 
ously for three thousand years. It is spreading in Manchuria 
and Siberia to-day. It roots deeply where it spreads. 

Partly the Huns were civilized and assimilated by the Chi- 
nese. The more northerly Huns, were checked and their super- 
abundant energies were turned westward. The southern Huns 
were merged into the imperial population. 

If the reader will examine the map of Central Asia, he will 
see that very great mountain barriers separate the Southern, 
Western, and Eastern peoples of Asia. (But he should be 
wary of forming his ideas from a map upon Mercator's projec- 
tion, which enormously exaggerates the areas and distances of 
Northern Asia and Siberia.) He will find that from the cen- 
tral mountain masses three great mountain systems radiate east- 
ward ; the Himalayas going south-eastward, south of Tibet, the 
Kuen Lun eastward, north of Tibet, and the Thien Shan north- 
eastward to join the Altai mountains. Further to the north is 
the great plain, still steadily thawing and drying. Between 
the Thien Shan and the Kuen Lun is an area, the Tarim Basin 
(= roughly Eastern Turkestan), of rivers that never reach 
the sea, but end in swamps and intennittent lakes. This basin 
was much more fertile in the past than it is now. The moun- 
tain barrier to the west of this Tarim Basin is high, but not 
forbidding; there are many practicable routes downward into 
Western Turkestan, and it is possible to travel either along the 
northern foothills of the Kuen Lun or by the Tarim valley 
westward from China to Kashgar (where the roads converge), 
and so over the mountains to Kokand, Samarkand, and Bok- 
hara. Here then is the natural meeting-place in history of 
Aryan and Mongolian. Here or round by the sea. 

We have already noted how Alexander the Great came to 
one side of the barrier in 329 B.C. High among the mountains 
of Turkestan a lake preserves his name. Indeed, so living is 
the tradition of his great raid, that almost any stone ruin in 
Central Asia is still ascribed to ''Iskander." After this brief 
glimpse, the light of history upon this region fades again, and 
when it becomes bright once more it is on the eastern and not 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 475 

upon the western side. Far away to the east Shi Hwang-ti had 
routed the Hvms and walled them out of China proper. A por- 
tion of these people remained in the north of China, a remnant 
which was destined to amalgamate with Chinese life under the 
Hans, but a considerable section had turned westward and 
(second and first centuries b.c.) driven before them a kindred 
people called the Yueh-Chi, driving them from the eastern to 
the western extremity of the Kuen Lun, and at last right over 
the barrier into the once Aryan region of Western Turkestan.^ 
These Yueh-Chi conquered the slightly Hellenized kingdom of 
Bactria, and mixed with Aryan people there. Later on these 
Yueh-Chi became, or were merged with Aryan elements into, a 
people called the Indo-Scythians, who went on down the Khyber 
Pass and conquered northern portions of India as far as Benares 
(100-150 A.D.), wiping out the last vestiges of Hellenic iiile 
in India. This big splash over of the Mongolian races west- 
ward was probably not the first of such splashes, but it is the 
first recorded splash. In the rear of the Yueh-Chi were the 
Huns, and in the rear of the Huns and turning them now north- 
ward was the vigorous Han Dynasty of China. In the reign 
of the greatest of the Han monarchs, Wu-Ti (140-86 B.C.), the 
Huns had been driven northward out of the whole of Eastern 
Turkestan or subjugated, the Tarim Basin swarmed with Chi- 
nese settlers, and caravans were going over westward with 
silk and lacquer and jade to trade for the gold and silver of 
Armenia and Rome. 

The splash over of the Yueh-Chi is recorded, but it is fairly 
evident that much westward movement of sections of the Hun- 
nish peoples is not recorded. From 200 b.c. to 200 a.d.. the 
Chinese Empire maintained a hard, resolute, advancing front 
towards nomadism, and the surplus of the nomads drifted 
steadily west. There was no such settling down behind a final 
frontier on the part of the Chinese as we see in the case of the 
Romans at the Rhine and Danube. The drift of the nomads 
before this Chinese thrust, century by century, turned south- 
ward at first towards Bactria. The Parthians of the first cen- 
tury B.C. probably mingled Scythian and Mongolian elements. 
The "singing arrows" that destroyed the army of Crassus came, 

' Even in Eastern Turkestan there are still strong evidences of Nordic 
blood in the physiognomy of the people. El!a and Percy Sykes, Through 
Deserts and Oases of Central Asia. 



476 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

it would seem, originally from the Altai and the Thien Shan. 
After the first century b.c. the line of greater attraction and 
least resistance lay for a time towards the north of the Caspian. 
In a century or so all the country known as Westeni Turkestan 
was "Mongolized," and so it remains to this day. A second 
great thrust hy China began about 75 a.d., and accelerated the 
westward drift of the noniads. In 102, Pan Chau, a Chinese 
general, was sending explorers from his advanced camp upon 
the Caspian (or, as some authorities say, the Persian Gulf) 
to learn particulars of the Roman power. But their reports 
decided him not to proceed. 

By the first century a.d. nomadic Mongolian peoples were 
in evidence upon the eastern boundaries of Europe, already 
greatly mixed with Nordic nomads and with uprooted Nordic 
elements from the Caspian-Pamir region. There were Hunnish 
peoples established between the Caspian Sea and the Urals. 
West of them were the Alans, probably also a Mongolian peo- 
ple with Nordic elements; they had fought against Pompey 
the Great when he was in Armenia in 65 b.c. These were as 
yet the furthest westward peoples of the new Mongolian ad- 
vance, and they made no further westward push until the fourth 
century a.d. To the north-west the Finns, a Mongolian people, 
had long been established as far west as the Baltic. 

West of the Huns, beyond the Don, there were purely Nordic 
tribes, the Goths. These Goths had spread south-eastward 
from their region of origin in Scandinavia. They were a Teu- 
tonic people, and we have already marked them crossing the 
Baltic in the map we have given of the earlier distribution of 
the Aryan-speaking people. These Goths continued to move 
south-eastward across Russia, using the rivers and never for- 
getting their Baltic watercraft. No doubt they assimilated 
much Scythian population as they spread down to the Black 
Sea. In the first century a.d. they were in two main divisions, 
the Ostrogoths, the east Goths, who were between the Don and 
the Dnieper, and the Visigoths, or west Goths, west of the 
Dnieper. During the first century there was quiescence over 
the great plains, but population was accumulating and the tribes 
were fermenting. The second and third centuries seem to have 
been a phase of comparatively moist seasons and abundant 
grass. Presently in the fourth and fifth centuries the weather 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 477 




478 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

grew drier and the grass became scanty and the nomads stirred 
afresh. 

But it is interesting to note that in the opening century of 
the Christian era, the Chinese Empire was strong enough to 
expel and push off from itself the surplus of this Mongolian 
nomadism to the north of it which presently conquered North 
India and gathered force and mingled with Aryan nomadism, 
and fell at last like an avalanche upon the weak-backed Koman 
Empire. 

Before we go on to tell of the blows that now began to fall 
upon the Roman Empire and of the efforts of one or two great 
men to arrest the collapce, we may say a few words about the 
habits and quality of these westward-drifting barbaric Mon- 
golian peoples who were now spreading from the limits of 
China towards the Black and Baltic Seas. It is still the Euro- 
pean custom to follow the lead of the Roman writers and write 
of these Hims and their associates as of something incredibly 
destructive and cruel. But such accounts as we have from the 
Romans were written in periods of panic, and the Roman could 
lie about his enemies with a freedom and vigour that must 
arouse the envy even of the modern propagandist. He could 
talk of 'Tunic faith" as a byword for perfidy while committing 
the most abominable treacheries against Carthage,- and his rail- 
ing accusations of systematic crnelty against this people or 
that were usually the prelude and excuse for some frightful 
massacre or enslavement or robbery on his own part. He had 
quite a modern passion for self-justification. We must remem- 
ber that these accounts of the savagery and frightfulness of 
the Huns came from a people whose chief amusement was 
gladiatorial shows, and whose chief method of dealing with in- 
surrection and sedition was nailing the offender to a cross to 
die. From first to last the Roman Empire must have killed 
hundreds of thousands of men in that way. A large portion 
of the population of this empire that could complain of the 
barbarism of its assailants consisted of slaves subject prac- 
tically to almost any lust or caprice at the hands of their owners. 
It is well to bear these facts in mind before we mourn the 
swamping of the Roman Empire by the barbarians as though 
it was an extinction of all that is fine in life by all that is black 
and ugly. 

The facts seem to be that the Hunnish peoples were the east- 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 479 

erii equivalent of the primitive Aryans, and that, in spite of 
their profound racial and linguistic ditferences, they mixed 
with the nomadic and semi-nomadic residuum of the Aryan- 
speaking races north of the Danube and Persia very easily and 
successfully. Instead of killing, they enlisted and intermarried 
with the peoples they invaded. They had that necessary gift 
for all peoples destined to political predominance, tolerant 
assimilation. They came rather later in time, and their 
nomadic life was more highly developed than that of the primi- 
tive Aryans. The primitive Aryans were a forest and ox-wagon 
people who took to the horse later. The Hunnish peoples had 
grown up with the horse. Somewhen about 1200 or 1000 
years b.c. they began to ride the horse. The bit, the saddle, 
the stirrup, these are not primitive things, but they are neces- 
sary if man and horse are to keep going for long stretches. It 
is well to bear in mind how modem a thing is riding. Alto- 
gether man has not been in the saddle for much more than three 
thousand years. ^ We have already noted the gradual appear- 
ance of the w^ar-chariot, the mounted man, and finally of dis- 
ciplined cavalry in this history. It was from the Mongolian 
regions of Asia that these things came. To this day men in 
Central Asia go rather in the saddle than on their proper feet. 
Says Ratzel,- ''Strong, long-necked horses are found in enor- 
mous numbers on the steppes. For Mongols and Turcomans 
riding is not a luxury; even the Mongol shepherds tend their 
flocks on horseback. Children are taught to ride in early youth ; 
and the boy of three years old often takes his first riding-lesson 
on a safe child's saddle and makes quick progress." 

It is impossible to suppose that the Huns and the Alans could 
have differed very widely in character from the present nomads 
of the steppe regions, and nearly all observers are agreed in 
describing these latter as open and pleasant people. They 
are thoroughly honest and free-spirited. ''The character of 
the herdsmen of Central Asia," says Ratzel,^ "when unadul- 
terated, is ponderous eloquence, frankness, rough good-nature, 
pride, but also indolence, irritability, and a tendency to vin- 
dictiveness. Their faces show a considerable share of frankness 

^See Roger Pocock, Horses, a very interesting and picturesque little 
book. 

^ The History of Mankind, book v., C. 
"Ibid. 



480 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

combined with amusing naivete. . . . Their courage is rather 
a sudden blaze of pugnacity than cold boldness. Eeligious 
fanaticism they have none. Hospitality is universal." This is 
not an entirely disagreeable picture. Their personal bearing, 
he says further, is quieter and more dignified than that of the 
townsmen of Turkestan and Persia. Add to this that the 
nomadic life prevents any great class inequalities or any ex- 
tensive development of slavery. 

Of course these peoples out of Asia were totally illiterate and 
artistically undeveloped. But we must not suppose, on that 
account, that they were primitive barbarians, and that their 
state of life was at the level from which the agricultural civili- 
zation had long ago arisen. It was not. They, too, had de- 
veloped, but they had developed along a different line, a line 
with less intellectual complication, more personal dignity per- 
haps, and certainly with a more intimate contact with wind 
and sky. 



The first serious irruptions of the German tribes into the 
Roman Empire began in the third century with the decay of 
the central power. We will not entangle the reader here with 
the vexed and intricate question of the names, identity, and 
inter-relationships of the various Germanic tribes. Historians 
find great difficulties in keeping them distinct, and these 
difficulties are enhanced by the fact that they them- 
selves took little care to keep themselves distinct. We find in 
236 A.D. a people called the Franks breaking bounds upon the 
Lower Rhine, and another, the Alamanni, pouring into Alsace. 
A much more serious push southward was that of the Goths. 
We have already noted the presence of these people in South 
Russia, and their division by the Dnieper into Western and 
Eastern Goths. They had become a maritime people again 
upon the Black Sea — probably their traditional migration from 
Sweden was along the waterways, for it is still possible to row 
a boat, with only a few quite practicable portages, from the 
Baltic right across Russia to either the Black or Caspian Sea 
— and they had wrested the command of the eastern seas from 
the control of Rome. They were presently raiding the shores 
of Greece. They also crossed the Danube in a great land raid 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 481 

in 247, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in what is 
now Serbia. The province of Dacia vanished from Eoman 
history. In 270 they were defeated at Nish in Serbia by 
Claudius, and in 276 they were raiding Pontus. It is char- 
acteristic of the invertebrate nature of the empire that the 
legions of Gaul found that the most effective method of deal- 
ing with the Franks and the Alamanni at this time was by 
setting up a separate emperor in Gaul and doing the job by 
themselves. 

Then for a while the barbarians were held, and the Emperor 
Probus in 276 forced the Franks and the Alamanni back over 
the Rhine. But it is significant of the general atmosphere 
of insecurity created by these raids that Aurelian (270-275) 
fortified Rome, which had been an open and secure city for all 
tJie earlier years of the empire. 

In 321 A.D. the Goths were again over the Danube, plunder- 
ing what is now Serbia and Bulgaria. They were driven back 
by Constantine the Great, of whom we shall have more to tell 
in the next chapter. About the end of his reign (337 a.d.) 
the Vandals, a people closely kindred to the Goths, being pressed 
by them, obtained permission to cross the Danube into Pan- 
nonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the river. 

But by the middle of the fourth century tbe Hunnish people 
to the east were becoming aggressive again. They had long 
subjugated the Alani, and now they made the Ostrogoths, the 
east Goths, tributary. The Visigoths (or west Goths) followed 
the example of the Vandals, and made arrangements to cross 
the Danube into Roman territory. There was some dispute 
upon the terms of this settlement, and the Visigoths, growing 
fierce, assumed the offensive, and at Adrianople defeated the 
Emperor Valens, who was killed in this battle. They were 
then allowed to settle in what "s now Bulgaria, and their army 
became nominally a Roman army, though they retained their 
own chiefs, the foremost of whom was Alaric. It exhibits 
the complete ''barbarization" of the Roman empire that had 
already occurred, that the chief opponent of Alaric the Goth, 
Stilicho, was a Pannonian Vandal. The legions in Gaul were 
under the command of a Frank, and the Emperor Theodosius I 
(emp. 379-395) was a Spaniard chiefly supported by Gothic 
auxiliaries. 

The empire was now splitting finally into an eastern (Greek- 



482 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

speaking) and a western (Latin-speaking) half. Theodosins 
the Great was succeeded by his sons Arcadius at Constanti- 
nople and Honorius at Ravenna. Alaric made a puppet of the 
eastern monarch and Stilicho of the western. Huns now first 
appear within the empire as auxiliary troops enlisted under 
Stilicho. In this struggle of East and West, the frontier — if 
we can still speak of a frontier between the unauthorized bar- 
barian without and the barbarian in employment within — gave 
way. Fresh Vandals, more Goths. Alans, Suevi, marched freely 
westward, living upon the country. Amidst this confusion 
occurred a crowning event. Alaric the Goth marched down 
Italy, and after a short siege captured Rome (410). 

By 425 or so, the Vandals (whom originally we noted in 
East Germany) and a portion of the Alani (whom we first 
mentioned in South-east Russia) had traversed Gaul and the 
Pyrenees, and had amalgamated and settled in the south of 
Spain. There were Huns in possession of Pannonia and Goths 
in Dalmatia. Into Bohemia and Moravia came and settled a 
Slavic people, the Czechs (451). In Portugal and north of 
the Vandals in Spain were Visigoths and Suevi. Gaul was 
divided among Visigoths, Franks, and Burgimdians. Britain 
was being invaded by Low German tribes, the Jutes, Angles 
and Saxons, before whom the Keltic British of the south-west 
were flying across the sea to what is now Brittany in France. 
The usual date given for this invasion is 449, but it was prob- 
ably earlier.^ And as the result of int.rig-ues between two im- 
perial politicians, the Vandals of the south of Spain, under 
their king Genseric, embarked en masse for ISTorth Africa (429), 
became masters of Carthage (439), secured the mastery of the 
sea, raided, captured, and pillaged Rome (455), crossed into 
Sicily, and set up a kingdom in West Sicily, which endured 
there for a hundred years (up to 534). At the time of its 
greatest extent (477) this Vandal kingdom included also 
Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles, as well as much of 
North Africa. 

About this Vandal kingdom facts and figures are given that 
show very clearly the true nature of these barbarian irruptions. 
They were not really the conquest and replacement of one peo- 
ple or race by another; what happened was something very 
different, it was a social revolution started and masked by a 

»E. B. 



THE CiESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 48^ 




484 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

superficial foreign conquest. The whole Vandal nation, men, 
women, and children, that came from Spain to Africa, for 
example, did not number more than eighty thousand souls. 
We know this because we have particulars of the transport 
problem. In their struggle for North Africa, Dr. Schurtz tells 
us,^ ''there is no trace of any serious resistance offered by the 
inhabitants; Boniface (the Koman governor of North Africa) 
had defended Hippo with Gothic mercenaries, while the native 
population lent no appreciable assistance, and the nomad tribes 
of the country either adopted a dubious attitude or availed them- 
selves of the difficulties of the Roman governor to make attacks 
and engage in predatory expeditions. This demoralization re- 
sulted from social conditions, which had perhaps developed more 
unfavourably in Africa than in other parts of the Roman Em- 
pire. The free peasants had long ago become the serfs of the 
great landed proprietors, and were little superior in position to 
the masses of slaves who were everywhere to be found. And 
the great landowners had become in their turn easy victims 
of the policy of extortion followed by unscrupulous governors 
to an increasingly unprecedented extent in proportion as the 
dignity of the imperial power sank lower. No man who had 
anything to lose would now take a place in the senate of the 
large towns, which had once been the goal of the ambitious, 
for the senators were required to make up all deficiencies in the 
revenue, and such deficiencies were now frequent and consider- 
able. . . . Bloody insurrections repeatedly broke out, always 
traceable ultimately to the pressure of taxation. . . ." 

Manifestly the Vandals came in as a positive relief to such 
a system. They exterminated the great landowners, wiped out 
all debts to Roman money-lenders, and abolished the last ves- 
tiges of military service. The cultivators found themselves 
better off; the minor officials kept their places; it was not so 
much a conquest as a liberation from an intolerable deadlock. 

It was while the Vandals were still in Africa that a great 
leader, Attila, arose among the Huns. The seat of his govern- 
ment was in the plains east of the Danube. For a time he 
swayed a considerable empire of Hunnish and Germanic tribes, 
and his rule stretched from the Rhine into Central Asia. He 
negotiated on equal terms with the Chinese emperor. He 
bullied Ravenna and Constantinople for ten years. Honoria, 

*In Helmolt's History of the World. 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 485 

the grand-daughter of Theodosius II, Emperor of the Eastern 
empire, one of those passionate young ladies who cause so much 
trouble in the world, having been put under restraint because 
of a love affair with a court chamberlain, sent her ring to 
Attila and called upon him to be her husband and deliverer. 
He was also urged to attack the Eastern empire by Genseric 
the Vandal, who was faced by an alliance of the Western and 
Eastern emperors. He raided southward to the very walls of 
Constantinople, completely destroying, says Gibbon, seventy 
cities in his progress, and forcing upon the emperor an onerous 
peace, which apparently did not involve the liberation of 
Honoria to her hero. 

At this distance of time we are unable to guess at the motives 
for this omission. Attila continued to speak of her as his 
affianced bride, and to use the relationship as a pretext for 
aggressions. In the subsequent negotiations a certain Priscus 
accompanied an embassy to the camp of the Hunnish monarch, 
and the fragments that still survive of the narrative he wrote 
give us a glimpse of the camp and way of living of the great 
conqueror. 

The embassy was itself a curiously constituted body. Its 
head was Maximin, an honest diplomatist who went in good 
faith. Quite unknown to him and, at the time, to Priscus, 
Vigilius, the interpreter of the expedition, had also a secret 
mission from the court of Theodosius which was to secure by 
bribery the assassination of Attila. The little expedition went 
by way of Nish ; it crossed the Danube in canoes, dug out of a 
single tree, and it was fed by contributions from the villages 
on the route. Differences in dietary soon attracted the atten- 
tion of the envoys. Priscus mentions mead in the place of wine, 
millet for corn, and a drink either distilled ^ or brewed from 
barley. The journey through Hungary will remind the reader 
in many of its incidents of the journeys of travellers in Central 
Africa during the Victorian period. The travellers were 
politely offered temporary wives. 

Attila's capital was rather a vast camp and village than a 
town. There was only one building of stone, a bath constructed 
on the Roman model. The mass of the people were in huts and 
tents ; Attila and his leading men lived in timber palaces in 
great stockaded enclosures with their numerous wives and min- 
» Gibbon. 



486 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

isters about them. There was a vast display of loot, but Attila 
himself affected a nomadic simplicity ; he was served in wooden 
cups and platters, and never touched bread. He worked hard, 
kept open court before the gate of his palace, and was commonly 
in the saddle. The primitive custom of both Aryans and Mon- 
gols of holding great feasts in hall still held good, and there 
was much hard drinking. Priscus describes how bards chanted 
before Attila. They ''recited the verses which they had com- 
posed, to celebrate his valour and his victories. A profound 
silence prevailed in the hall, and the attention of the • guests 
was captivated by the vocal hannony, which revived and per- 
petuated the memory of their own exploits; a martial ardour 
flashed from the eyes of the warriors, who were impatient for 
battle; and the tears of the old men expressed their generous 
despair, that they could no longer partake the danger and glory 
of the iield. This entertainment, which might be considered 
as a school of military virtue, was succeeded by a farce that 
debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and Scythian 
buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators by 
their deformed figures, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd 
speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, 
the Gothic, and the Hunnish languages, and the hall resounded 
with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of 
this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without change of counte- 
nance, maintained his steadfast and inflexible gravity." ^ 

Although Attila was aware, through the confession of the 
proposed assassin, of the secret work of Vigilius, he allowed 
this embassy to return in safety, with presents of numerous 
horses and the like, to Constantinople. Then he despatched an 
ambassador to Theodosius II to give that monarch, as people 
say, a piece of his mind. "Theodosius," said the envoy, "is 
the son of an illustrious and respectable parent; Attila, like- 
wise, is descended from a noble race; and he has supported, by 
his actions the dignity which he inherited from his father 
Munzuk. But Theodosius has forfeited his parental honours, 
and, by consenting to pay tribute, has degraded himself to the 
condition of a slave. It is therefore just that he should rever- 
ence the man whom fortune and merit have placed above him ; 
instead of attempting, like a wicked slave, clandestinely to 
conspire against his master." 

' Gibbons. 



THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 487 

This straightforward bullying was met by abject submission. 
The emperor sued for pardon, and paid a gi-eat ransom. 

In 451 Attila declared war on the western empire. He 
invaded Gaul. So far as the imperial forces were concerned, 
he had things all his own way, and he sacked most of the towns 
of France as far south as Orleans. Then the Franks and 
Visigoths and the imperial forces united against him, and a 
gi'eat and obstinate battle at Troyes (451), in which over 
150,000 men were killed on both sides, ended in his repulse 
and saved Europe from a Mongolian overlord. This disaster 
by no means exhausted Attila's resources. He turned his at- 
tention southward, and overran E'orth Italy. He burnt Aquileia 
and Padua, and looted Milan, but he made peace at the entreaty 
of Pope Leo I. He died in 453. . . . 

Hereafter the Huns, so far as that name goes in Europe, the 
Huns of Attila, disappeared out of history. They dissolve into 
the surrounding populations. They were probably already much 
mixed, and rather Aryan than Mongolian. They did not be- 
come, as one might suppose, the inhabitants of Hungary, though 
they have probably left many descendants there. About a hun- 
dred years after came another Hunnish or mixed people, the 
Avars, out of the east into LIungary, but these were driven out 
eastward again by Charlemagne in 791-5. The Magyars, the 
modern Hungarians, came westward later. They were a 
Turko-Finnish people. The Magyar is a language belonging to 
the Finno-ITgrian division of the Ural-Altaic tongues. The 
Magyars were on the Volga about 550. They settled in Hun- 
gary aboutf 900. . . . But we are getting too far on in our 
story, and we must return to Eome. 

In 493 Theodoric, a Goth, became King of Eome, but already 
for seventeen years there had been no Roman emperor. So 
it was in utter social decay and collapse that the gTeat slave- 
holding 'Svorld-ascendancy" of the God-Csesars and the rich 
men of Rome came to an end. 



§ 6 

But though throughout the whole of Western Europe and 
North Africa the Roman imperial system had collapsed, though 
credit had vanished, luxury production had ceased and money 
was hidden, though creditors were going unpaid and slaves 



488 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



masterless, the tradition of the Csesars was still being carried 
on in Constantinople. We have already had occasion to men- 
tion as two outstanding figures among the late Caesars, Diocle- 
tian (284) and Constantine the Great (312), and it was to 
the latter of these that the world owes the setting up of a fresh 
imperial centre at Constantinople. Very early during the im- 
perial period the unsuitability of the position of Rome as a 
world capital, due to the Roman failure to use the sea, was felt. 



<ri^:EA5TER1sr I^OMATC 'EMPIRE dr^JOOAX. 



uAietiTkcodiOru; tuas king 
cf Italu & iSlcaii . & nam- 
vnaUi{ .sutjcck tb -tivz 
"Emocxrov at Coastaxiiizuij^ 

Kingiam. cf 
Thlodoric 





The destruction of Carthage and Corinth had killed the ship- 
ping of the main Mediterranean sea-routes. For a people who 
did not use the sea properly, having the administrative centre 
at Rome meant that every legion, every draft of officials, every 
order, had to travel northward for half the length of^ Italy 
before it could turn east or west. Consequently nearly all the 
more capable emperors set up their headquarters at some sub- 
ordinate centre in a more convenient position. Sirmium (on 
the River Save), Milan, Lyons, and Nicomedia (in Bithynia) 
were among such supplementary capitals. For a time under 
Diocletian, Durazzo was the imperial capital. Ravenna, near 



THE CJESARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 489 

the head of the Adriatic, was the capital of the last Roman 
emperors in the time of Alaric and Stilicho. 

It was Constantine the Great who detemiined upon the 
permanent transfer of the centre of imperial power to the 
Bosphorus. We have already noted the existence of the city 
of Byzantium, which Constantine chose to develop into his new 
capital. It played a part in the story of the intricate Ilistiseus 
(Chap, xxi, § 4) ; it repulsed Philip of Macedon (Chap, xxiii, 
§ 3). If the reader will examine its position, he will see that 
in the hands of a line of capable emperors, and as the centre 
of a people with some solidarity and spirit and seacraft (neither 
of winch things were vouchsafed to it), it was extraordinarily 
well placed. Its galleys could have penetrated up the rivers 
to the heart of Russia and outflanked every barbarian advance. 
It commanded practicable trade routes to the east, and it was 
within a reasonable striking distance of Mesopotamia, Egypt, 
Greece, and all the more prosperous and civilized regions of 
the world at that period. And even under the rule of a series 
of inept monarchs and under demoralized social conditions, the 
remains of the Roman Empire centring at Constantinople held 
out for nearly a thousand years. 

It was the manifest intention of Constantine the Great that 
Constantinople should be the centre of an undivided empire. 
But having regard to the methods of travel and transport avail- 
able at the time, the geographical conditions of Europe and 
Western Asia do not point to any one necessary centre of govern- 
ment. If Rome faced westward instead of eastward, and so 
failed to reach out beyond the Euphrates, Constantinople on 
the other hand was hopelessly remote from Gaul. The enfeebled 
Mediterranean civilization, after a certain struggle for Italy, 
did in fact let go of the west altogether and concentrated upon 
what were practically the central vestiges, the stump, of the 
empire of Alexander. The Greek langl^age resumed its sway, 
which had never been very seriously undermined by the official 
use of Latin. This ''Eastern" or Byzantine empire is generally 
spoken of as if it were a continuation of the Roman tradition. 
It is really far more like a resumption of Alexander's. 

The Latin language had not the intellectual vigour behind it^ 
it had not the literature and the science, to make it a neces- 
sity to intelligent men and so to maintain an ascendancy over 
the Greek. For no language, whatever officialdom may do, 



490 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE C^SARS BETWEEN SEA AND PLAINS 491 

can impose itself in competition with another that can offer 
the advantages of a great literature or encyclopi:edic informa- 
tion. Aggressive languages must bring gifts, and the gifts of 
Greek were incomparably greater than the gifts of Latin. The 
Eastern empire was from the beginnings of its separation Greek- 
speaking, and a continuation, though a degenerate continua- 
tion, of the Llellenic tradition. Its intellectual centre was no 
longer in Greece, but Alexandria. Its mentality was no longer 
the mentality of free-minded plain-speaking citizens, of the 
Stagirite Aristotle and the Greek Plato ; its mentality was the 
mentality of the pedants and of men politically impotent ; its 
philosophy was a pompous evasion of real things, and its scien- 
tific impulse was dead. Nevertheless, it was Hellenic and not 
Latin. The Eoman had come, and he had gone again. Indeed 
he had gone very extensively from the west also. By the sixth 
century a.d. the populations of Europe and North Africa had 
been stirred up like sediment. When presently in the seventh 
and eighth centuries the sediment begins to settle down again 
and populations begin to take on a definite localized character, 
the Eoman is only to be found by name in the region about 
Eome. Over large parts of his Western empire we find changed 
and changing modifications of his Latin speech ; in Gaul, where 
the Frank is learning a Gallic form of Latin and evolving 
French in the process; in Ital}^, where, under the influence of 
Teutonic invaders, the Lombards and Goths, Latin is being 
modified into various Italian dialects ; in Spain and Portugal, 
where it is becoming Spanish and Portuguese. The funda- 
mental Latinity of the languages in these regions serves to re- 
mind us of the numerical unimportance of the various Frankish, 
Vandal, Avar, Gothic, and the like German-speaking invaders, 
and serves to justify our statement that what happened to the 
Western empire was not so much conquest and the replacement 
of one population by another as a political and social revolu- 
tion. The district of Valais in South Switzerland also retained 
a fundamentally Latin speech and so did the Canton Grisons ; 
and, what is more curious and interesting, is that in Dacia and 
Ma?sia Inferior, large parts of which to the north of the Danube 
became the modern Eoumania (== Eomania), although these 
regions were added late to the empire and lost soon, the Latin 
speech also remained. 

In Britain Latin was practically wiped out by the conquering 



492 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Anglo-Saxons, from among whose various dialects the root stock 
of English presently grew. 

But while the smashing of the Roman social and political 
structure was thus complete, while in the east it was thrown 
off by the older and stronger Hellenic tradition, and while 
in the west it was broken up into fragments that began to take 
on a new and separate life of their own, there was one thing 
that did not perish, hut grew, and that was the tradition of 
the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the Csesars. 
When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to 
expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea 
of a serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in 
the imagination of mankind, and still holds it to this day. 

Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been 
haunted by the possible political unity of the race. All the 
sturdy chiefs and leaders and kings of the barbarians, who 
raided through the prostrate but vast disorder of the decayed 
empire, were capable of conceiving of some mighty king of 
kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for all 
men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space 
and time, and capable of returning presently to resume his 
supremacy, Caesar had been such a king of kings. Far above 
their own titles, therefore, they esteemed and envied the title 
of Cipsar. The international history of Europe from this time 
henceforth is largely the story of kings and adventurers setting 
up to be Csesar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall tell of 
some of them in their places. So universal did this "Cse&aring" 
become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer 
than four Caesars, the German Kaiser (= Caesar), the Austrian 
Kaiser, the Tsar (= Caesar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, 
the Tsar of Bulgaria. The French "Imperator" (Napoleon 
III) had already fallen in 1871. There is now (1920) no one 
left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or the tradition 
of Dims Caesar except the Turkish Sultan and the British mon- 
arch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constanti- 
nople as Kaisar-i-Roum ; the latter is called the Caesar of India 
(a country no real Caesar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind. 



XXIX 

THE BEGINNINGS, THE RISE, AND THE DIVISIONS 
OF CHRISTIANITY 

§ 1. Judea at the Christian Era. § 2. The Teachmgs of Jesus 
of Nazareth. § 3. The New Universal Religions. § 4. 
llie Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. § 5. Doctrines 
Added to the Teachings of Jesus. § 6. The Struggles and 
Persecutions of Christianity. § 7. Constantine the Great. 
§ 8. The Establishment of Official Christianity. § 9. The 
Map of Europe, A. D. 500. § 10. The Salvation of Learn- 
ing hy Christianity. 



BEFORE we can understand the qualities of Christianity, 
which must now play a large part in our history, and 
which opened men's eyes to fresh aspects of the possi- 
bility of a unified world, we must go back some centuries and 
tell of the condition of affairs in Palestine and Syria, in which 
countries Christianity arose. We have already told the main 
facts about the origin of the Jewish nation and tradition, about 
the Diaspora, about the fundamentally scattered nature of 
Jewry even from the beginning, and the gradual development of 
the idea of one just God ruling the earth and bound by a special 
promise to preserve and bring to honour the Jewish people. The 
Jewish idea was and is a curious combination of theological 
breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The Jews looked 
for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind 
by the agTceable process of restoring the fabulous glories of 
David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under 
the benevolent but firm Jewish heel. As the political power 
of the Semitic peoples declined, as Carthage followed Tyre 
into the darkness and Spain became a Roman province, this 
dream g-rew and spread. There can be little doubt that the 
scattered Phoenicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the 

493 



494 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin 
to Hebrew and being deprived of their authentic political rights, 
became proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous prosely- 
tism alternated with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish 
history. On one occasion the Idumeans, being conquered, were 
all forcibly made Jews.^ There were Arab tribes who were 
Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkish people who 
were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Juda- 
ism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered 
peoples — mainly Semitic. It is to the Phoenician contingent 
and to Aramean accessions in Babylon that the financial and 
commercial tradition of the Jews is to be ascribed. But as a 
result of these coalescences and assimilations, almost every- 
where in the towns throughout the Roman Empire, and far 
beyond it in the east, Jewish communities traded and flourished, 
and were kept in touch through the Bible, and through a re- 
ligious and educational organization. The main part of Jewry 
never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea. 

Manifestly this intercommunicating series of Judaized com- 
munities had very great financial and political facilities. They 
could assemble resources, they could stir up, they could allay. 
They were neither so abundant nor so civilized as the still more 
widely diffused Greeks, but they had a tradition of greater 
solidarity. Greek was hostile to Greek ; Jew stood by Jew. 
Wherever a Jew went, he found men of like mind and like 
tradition with himself. He could get shelter, food, loans, and 
legal help. And by reason of this solidarity rulers had every- 
where to take account of this people as a help, as a source of 
loans, or as a source of trouble. So it is that the Jews have 
persisted as a people while Hellenism has become a universal 
light for mankind. 

We cannot tell here in any detail the history of that smaller 
part of Jewry that lived in Judea. These Jews had returned 
to their old position of danger ; again they were seeking peace 
in, so to speak, the middle of a highway. In the old time they 
had been between Syria and Assyria to the north and Egypt to 
the south; now they had the Seleucids to the north and the 
Ptolemys to the south, and when the Seleucids went, then down 
came the Roman power upon them. The independence of 
Judea was always a qualified and precarious thing. The reader 
^ Josepbus. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 



495 



must go to the Antiquities and the Wars of the Jeirs of Flavins 
Josephus, a copious, tedious, and maddeningly patriotic writer, 
to learn of the succession of their rulers, of their high-priest 
monarchs, and of 
the Maccabseans, the 
Herods and the like. 
These rulers were 
for the most part of 
the ordinary eastern 
type, cunning, 
treacherous, and 
yood-stained. Thrice 
Jerusalem was taken 
and twice the temple 
was destroyed. It 
was the support of 
the far more power- 
ful Diaspora that 
prevented the little 
country from being 
wiped out alto- 
gether, until 70 A.D., 
when ITitus, the 
adopted son and suc- 
cessor of the Em- 
p e r o r Vespasian, 
after a siege that 
ranks in bitterness 
and horror with that 
of Tyre and Car- 
thage, took Jerusa- 
lem and destroyed 
city and temple alto- 
gether. He did this 
in an attempt to destroy Jewry, but indeed he made Jewry 
stronger by destroying its one sensitive and vulnerable point. 
Throughout a history of five centuries of war and civil com- 
motion between the return from captivity and the destruction 
of Jerusalem, certain constant features of the Jew persisted. 
He remained obstinately monotheistic ; he would have none 
other gods but the one true God. In Kome, as in Jerusalem, 




496 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

he stood out manfully against tlie worship of any god-Csesar. 
And to the best of his ability he held to his covenants with his 
God. Xo graven images could enter Jerusalem; even the 
Eoman standards with their eagles had to stay outside. 

Two divergent lines of thought are traceable in Jewish affairs 
during these five hundred years. On the right, so to speak, are 
the high and narrow Jews, the Pharisees, very orthodox, very 
punctilious upon even the minutest details of the law, intensely 
patriotic and exclusive. Jerusalem on one occasion fell to the 
Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV because the Jews would not 
defend it on the Sabbath day, when it is forbidden to work; 
and it was because the Jews made no effort to destroy his siege 
train on the Sabbath that Pompey the Great was able to take 
Jerusalem. But against these narrow Jews were pitted the 
broad Jews, the Jews of the left, who were Hellenizers, among 
whom are to be ranked the Sadducees, who did not believe in 
immortality. These latter Jews, the broad Jews, were all 
more or less disposed to mingle with and assimilate themselves 
to the Greeks and Hellenized peoples about them. They were 
ready to accept proselytes, and so to share God and his promise 
with all mankind. But what they gained in generosity they 
lost in rectitude. They were the worldlings of Judea. We 
have already noted how the Hellenized Jews of Egypt lost their 
Hebrew, and had to have their Bible translated into Greek. 

In the reign of Tiberius C?esar a great teacher arose out of 
Judea who was to liberate the intense realization of the right- 
eousness and unchallengeable oneness of God, and of man's 
moral obligation to God, which was the strength of orthodox 
Judaism, from that greedy and exclusive narrowness with which 
it was so extraordinarily intermingled in the Jewish mind. This 
was Jesus of Nazareth, the seed rather than the founder of 
Christianity. 



The audience to which this book will first be presented will 
be largely an audience of Christians, with perhaps a sprinkling 
of Jewish readers, and the former at least will regard Jesus of 
Nazareth as being much more than a human teacher, and his 
appearance in the world not as a natural event in history, but 
as something of a supernatural sort interrupting and changing 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 497 

that steady development of life towards a common consciousness 
and a common will, which we have hitherto been tracino- in tJiis 
book. But these persuasions, dominant as they are in Europe 
and America, are nevertheless not the persuasions of all men 
or of the great majority of mankind, and we are writing this 
outline of the story of life with, as complete an avoidance of 
controversial matter as may be. We are trying- to write as if 
this book was to be read as much by Hindus or Moslems or 
Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans. We shall *^ 
therefore hold closely to the apparent facts, and avoid, without 
any disputation or denial, the theological interpretations that 
have been imposed upon them. We shall tell what men have 
believed about Jesus of N^azaretli, but him we shall treat as 
being what he appeared to be, a man, just as a painter must 
needs paint him as a man. The documents that testify to his 
acts and teachings we shall treat as ordinary human documents. 
If the light of divinity shine through our recital, we will neither 
help nor hinder it. This is what we have already done in the 
case of Buddha, and what we shall do later with Muhammad. 
About Jesus we have to write not theology but history, and 
our concern is not with the spiritual and theological significance 
of his life, but with its effects upon the political and every-day 
life of men. 

Almost our only sources of information about the personality 
of Jesus are derived from the four gospels, all of which were 
certainly in existence a few decades after his death, and from 
allusions to his life in the letters (epistles) of the early Chris- 
tian propagandists. The first three gospels, the gospels of 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, many suppose to be derived from 
some earlier documents ; the gospel of St. John has more idiosyn- 
crasy and is coloured by theology of a strongly Hellenic type. 
Critics are disposed to regard the gospel of St. Mark as being 
the most trustworthy account of the personality and actual 
words of Jesus. But all four agree in giving us a picture 
of a veiy definite personality ; they carry the same conviction 
of reality that the early accounts of Buddha do. In spite of 
miraculous and incredible additions, one is obliged to say, ''Here 
was a man. This part of the tale could not have been invented." 

But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been 
distorted and obscured by the stift" squatting figure, the gilded 
idol of later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous 



498 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

personality of Jesus is much wronged by tlie unreality and con- 
ventionality that a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his 
figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was a penniless teacher, 
who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living 
upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, 
combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with some- 
thing motionless about him as though he was gliding through 
the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to 
many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from 
the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently 
devout. 

And it may be that the early parts of the gospels are accre- 
tions of the same nature. The miraculous circumstances of 
the birth of Jesus, the gTeat star that brought wise men from 
the east to worship at his manger cradle, the massacre of the 
male infant children in the region of Bethlehem by Herod 
as a consequence of these portents, and the flight into Egypt, 
are all supposed to be such accretionary matter by many authori- 
ties. At the best they are events unnecessary to the teaching, 
and they rob it of much of the streng-th and power it possesses 
when we strip it of such accompaniment. So, too, do the dis- 
crepant genealogies given by Matthew and Luke, in which there 
is an endeavour to trace the direct descent of Joseph, his father, 
from King David, as though it was any honour to Jesus or to 
anyone to have such a man as an ancestor. The insertion of 
these genealogies is the more peculiar and unreasonable, be- 
cause, according to the legend, Jesus was not the son of Joseph 
at all, but miraculously conceived. 

We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult acces- 
sories, with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and 
passionate, capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and 
simple and profound doctrine — namely, the universal loving 
Fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. 
He was clearly a person — to use a common phrase — of intense 
personal magnetism. He attracted followers and filled them 
with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened 
and healed by his presence. Yet he was probably of a delicate 
physique, because of the swiftness with which he died under 
the pains of crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted 
when, according to the custom, he was made to bear his cross 
to the place of execution. When he first appeared as a teacher 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 499 

he was a man of about thirty. He went about the country for 
three years spreadinc; his doctrine, and then he came to Jerusa- 
lem and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in 
Judea ; he was tried upon this charge, and crucified together 
with two thieves. Long before these two were dead, his suffer- 
ings were over. ■ 

Now it is a matter of fact that in the gospels all that body 
of theological assertion which constitutes Christianity finds lit- 
tle support. There is, as the reader may see for himself, no 
clear and emphatic assertion in these books of the doctrines 
which Christian teachers of all denominations find generally 
necessary to salvation. Except for one or two passages in St. 
John's Gospel it is difficult to get any words actually ascribed 
to Jesus in which he claimed to be the Jewish Messiah 
(rendered in Greek by "the Christ") and still more difficult 
is it to find any claim to be a part of the godhead, or any pas- 
sage in which he explained the doctrine of the Atonement or 
urged any sacrifices or sacraments (that is to say, priestly 
offices) upon his followers. We shall see presently how later 
on all Christendom was torn by disputes about the Trinity. 
There is no evidence that the apostles of Jesus ever heard of 
the Trinity — at any rate from him. The observance of the 
Jewish Sabbath, again, transferred to the Mithraic Sun-day, is 
an important feature of many Christian cults; but Jesus de- 
liberately broke the Sabbath, and said that it was made for man 
and not man for the Sabbath. Nor did he say a word about 
the worship of his mother Mary, in the guise of Isis, the Queen 
of Heaven. All that is most characteristically Christian in 
worship and usage, he ignored. Sceptical writers have had the 
temerity to deny that Jesus can be called a Christian at all. 
For light upon these extraordinary gaps in his teaching, each 
reader must go to his own religious guides. Here we are bound 
to mention these gaps on account of the difficulties and con- 
troversies that arose out of them, and we are equally bound not 
to enlarge upon them. 

As remarkable is the enormous prominence given by Jesus 
to the teaching of what he called the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
its comparative insignificance in the procedure and teaching of 
most of the Christian churches. 

This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main 
teaching of Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Chris- 



500 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tian creeds, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines 
that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small won- 
der if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance, 
and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its 
tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions 
of mankind. It is small wonder if the hesitating convert and 
disciple presently went back to the old familiar ideas of temple 
and altar, of fierce deity and propitiatory- observance, of conse- 
crated priest and magic blessing, and — these things i^eing at- 
tended to — reverted then to the dear old habitual life of hates 
and profits and competition and pride. For the doctrine of 
the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, 
was no less than a bold and uncompromising demand for a 
complete change and cleansing of the life of our struggling race, 
an utter cleansing, without and within. To the gospels the 
reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous 
teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact 
upon established ideas. 

The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole 
world, was a righteous god, but they also thought of him as a 
trading god who had made a bargain with their Father Abra- 
ham about them, a very good bargain indeed for them, to bring 
them at last to predominance in the earth. With dismay and 
anger they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear securities. 
God, he taught, was no bargainer; there were no chosen people 
and no favourites in the Kingdom of Heaven. God was the 
loving father of all life, as incapable of showing favour as the 
universal sun. And all men were brothers — sinners alike and 
beloved sons alike — of this divine father. In the parable of 
the Good Samaritan Jesus cast scorn upon that natural tendency 
we all obey, to glorify our own people and to minimize the 
righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the parable 
of the labourers he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the 
Jews to have a sort of first mortgage upon God. All whom 
God takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike ; there 
is no distinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to 
his bounty. From all, moreover, as the parable of the buried 
talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's mite en- 
forces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no 
rebates, and no excuses in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

But it was not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 501 

that Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family 
loyalty, and he would have swept away all the narrow and re- 
strictive family affections in the great flood of the love of God. 
The whole Kingdom of Heaven was to be the family of his 
followers. We are told that, "While he yet talked to the peo- 
ple, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring 
to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother 
and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. 
But he answered and said unto him that told him, Wlio is my 
mother ? and who are my brethren ? And he stretched forth his 
hand towards his disciples, and said. Behold my mother and 
my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father 
which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and 
mother." ^ 

And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds 
of family loyalty in the name of God's universal fatherhood 
and the brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his 
teaching condemned all the gradations of the economic system, 
all private wealth, and personal advantages. All men belonged 
to the kingdom ; all their possessions belonged to the kingdom ; 
the righteous life for all men, the only righteous life, was the 
service of God's will with all that we had, with all that we were. 
Again and again he denounced private riches and the reserva- 
tion of any private life. 

"And when he was gone forth into the way, there came 
one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him. Good Master, 
what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus 
said unto him. Why callest thou me good ? there is none good 
but one, that is, God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do 
not commit adultery. Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear 
false witness. Defraud not. Honour thy father and mother. 
And he answered and said unto him. Master, all these things 
have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him 
loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest : go thy 
way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou 
shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and 
follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away 
grieved : for he had great possessions. 

"And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, 
How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom 
^Matt. xii. 46-50. 



502 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. 
But Jesus answered again, and saith unto them, Children, how 
hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom 
of God ! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a 
needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." ^ 

Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom which 
was to make all men one together in God, Jesus had small 
patience for the bargaining righteousness of formal religion. 
Another large part of his recorded utterances is aimed against 
the meticulous observance of the rules of the pious career. 
''Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and certain of 
the scribes, which came from Jerusalem. And when they saw 
some of his disciples eat bread with defiled, that is to say, with 
unwashen, hands, they found fault. For the Pharisees, and 
all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding 
the tradition of the elders. And when they come from the 
market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things 
there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of 
cups, and pots, brazen vessels, and of tables. Then the Phari- 
sees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples accord- 
ing to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen 
hands ? He answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah 
prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, 

"This people honoureth me with their lips, 

"But their heart is far from me. 

"Howbeit in vain do they worship me, 

"Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. 

"For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the 
tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many 
other such things ye do. And he said unto them. Full well 
ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own 
tradition." ^ 

So, too, we may note a score of places in which he flouted 
that darling virtue of the formalist, the observance of the 
Sabbath. 

It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus 
proclaimed; it is clear from a score of indications that his 
teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true 
that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in 
the hearts of men and not upon a throne ; but it is equally clear 
^Mark. x. 17-25. ''Mark. vii. 1-9. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 503 

that wherever and in what measure his kingdom was set up 
in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in that measure 
revolutionized and made new. 

Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may 
have missed in his utterances, it is plain that they did not 
miss his resolve to revolutionize the world. Some of the ques- 
tions that were brought to Jesus and the answers he gave enable 
us to g-uess at the drift of much of his unrecorded teaching. 
The directness of his political attack is manifest by such an 
incident as that of the coin — 

"And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the 
Herodians, to catch him in his words. And when they were 
come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, 
and carest for no man : for thou regardest not the person of 
men, but teachest the way of God in truth : Is it lawful to give 
tribute to Csesar, or not ? Shall we give, or shall we not give ? 
But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them. Why tempt ye 
me? bring me a penny, that I may see it. And they brought 
it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and super- 
scription? And they said unto him, Caesar's. And Jesus an- 
swering said unto them, Eender to Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" ^ — which in 
view of all else that he had taught, left very little of a man 
or his possessions for Caesar. 

The whole tenor of the opposition to him and the circum- 
stances of his trial and execution show clearly that to his con- 
temporaries he seemed to propose plainly and did propose 
plainly to change and fuse and enlarge all human life. But 
even his disciples did not grasp the profound and comprehensive 
significance of that proposal. They were ridden by the old 
Jewish dream of a king, a Messiah to overthrow the Hellenized 
Herods and the Roman overlord, and restore the fabled glories 
of David. They disregarded the substance of his teaching, 
plain and direct though it was ; evidently they thought it was 
merely his mysterious and singular way of setting about the 
adventure that would at last put him on the throne of Jenisa- 
lem. They thought he was just another king among the endless 
succession of kings, but of a quasi-magic kind, and making 
quasi-magic profession of an impossible virtue, 

"And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come unto him, 
>Mark. xii. 13-17. 



504 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

saying Master, we would that tJiou shouldest do for us whatso- 
ever we shall desire. And he said unto them, What would 
ye that I should do for you ? They said unto him, Grant unto 
us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on 
thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said unto them. Ye know 
not what ye ask : can ye drink of the cup that I drink of ? and 
be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with ? And 
they said unto him. We can. And Jesus said unto them. Ye 
shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the 
baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized : but to 
sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give ; 
but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared. And 
when the ten heard it, they began to be much displeased with 
James and John. But Jesus called them to him, and saith 
unto them. Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over 
the Gentiles exercise lordship over them ; and their great ones 
exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among 
you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your 
minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be 
servant of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be minis- 
tered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for 
many." ^ 

This was cold comfort for those who looked for a due reward 
for their sei*vices and hardships in his train. They could not 
believe this hard doctrine of a kingdom of service which was 
its own exceeding great reward. Even after his death upon 
the cross, they could still, after their first dismay, revert to 
the belief that he was nevertheless in the vein of the ancient 
world of pomps and privileges, that presently by some amazing 
miracle he would become undead again and return, and set 
up his throne with much splendour and graciousness in Jerusa- 
lem. They thought his life was a stratagem and his death a 
trick. 

He was too great for his disciples. And in view of what he 
plainly said, is it any wonder that all who were rich and pros- 
perous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their world 
at his teaching? Perhaps the priests and the rulers and the 
rich men understood him better than his followers. He was 
dragging out all the little private reseiTations they had made 
from social service into the light of a universal religious life. 

^Mark x. 35-45. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 505 

He was like scmp , terrible moral hiintsm?^ Higging mankind 
out of the snug burrows "in which they had lived hitherto. In 
the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no prop- 
erty^ no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive indeed 
and n© reward but love. Is it any wonder that men were dazzled 
and blinded and cried' out against him ? Even his disciples 
cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it any 
wonder that the priests realized that between^ t^is man and 
themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should 
perish ? Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted 
and amazed by something soaring over their comprehension and 
threatening all their disciplines, should take refuge in wild 
laughter, and crown him with thon:is and robe him in purple 
and make a mock Csesar of him ? For to take him seriously was 
to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, 
to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible 
happiness. . . . 

Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much 
for our small hearts? 



Yet be it noted that while there was much in the real teach- 
ings of Jesus that a rich man or a priest or a trader or an 
imperial official or any ordinary respectable citizen could not 
accept without the most revolutionary changes in his way of 
living, yet there was nothing that a follower of the actual teach- 
ing of Gautama Sakya might not receive very readily, nothing 
to prevent a primitive Buddhist from being also a Nazarene, 
and nothing to prevent a personal disciple of Jesus from ac- 
cepting all the recorded teachings of Buddha. 

Again consider the tone of this extract from the writings of 
a Chinaman, Mo Ti, who lived somewhen in the fourth century 
B.C., when the doctrines of Confucius and Lao Tse prevailed 
in China, before the advent of Buddhism to that country, and 
note how "Nazarene" it is. 

"The mutual attacks of state on state; the mutual usurpa- 
tions of family on family ; the mutual robberies of man on 
man ; the want of kindness on the part of the sovereign and of 
loyalty on the part of the minister ; the want of tenderness and 
filial duty between father and son — these, and such as these, are 



506 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the things injurious to the empire. All this has arisen from 
want of mutual love. If but that one virtue could be made 
universal, the princes loving one another would have no bat- 
tle-fields ; the chiefs of families would attempt no usurpations ; 
men would commit no robberies; rulers and ministers would 
be gracious and loyal ; fathers and sons would be kind and filial ; 
brothers would be harmonious and easily reconciled. Men in 
general loving one another, the strong would not make prey 
of the weak; the many would not plunder the few, the rich 
would not insult the poor, the noble would not be insolent to 
the mean; and the deceitful would not impose upon the 
simple." ^ 

This is extraordinarily like the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth 
cast into political terms. The thoughts of Mo Ti came close 
to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

This essential identity is the most important historical aspect 
of these great world religions. They were in their beginnings 
quite unlike the priest, altar, and temple cults, those cults for 
the worship of definite finite gods that played so great and so 
essential a part in the earlier stages of man's development be- 
tween 15,000 B.C. and 600 b.c. These new world religions, 
from 600 b.c. onward, were essentially religions of the heart 
and of the universal sky. They swept away all those various 
and limited gods that had served the turn of human needs since 
the first communities were welded together by fear and hope. 
And presently when we come to Islam we shall find that for a 
third time the same fundamental new doctrine of the need of a 
universal devotion of all men to one Will reappears. Warned 
by the experiences of Christianity, Muhammad was very 
emphatic in insisting that he himself was merely a man and so 
saved his teaching from much corruption and misrepresenta- 
tion. 

We speak of these great religions of mankind which arose be- 
tween the Persian conquest of Babylon and the break-up of 
the Roman empire as rivals; but it is their defects, their ac- 
cumulations and excrescences, their differences of language and 
phrase, that cause the rivalry ; and it is not to one overcoming 
the other or to any new variant replacing them that we must 
look, but to the white truth in each being burnt free from it's 
dross, and becoming manifestly the same truth — namely, that 
^ Hirth, The Ancietit History of China, Chap. viii. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 507 

the hearts of men, and therewith all the lives and institutions 
of men, must be subdued to one common Will, ruling them all.^ 
And though much has been written foolishly about the an- 
tagonism of science and religion, there is indeed no such 
antagonism. What all these world religions declare by inspira- 
tion and insight, history as it grows clearer and science as its 
range extends display, as a reasonable and demonstrable fact, 
that men form one universal brotherhood, that they spring from 
one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations 
and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at 
last in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst 
the stars. And the psychologist can now stand beside the 
preacher and assure us that there is no reasoned peace of heart, 
no balance and no safety in the soul, until a man in losing his 
life has found it, and has schooled and disciplined his interests 
and will beyond greeds, rivalries, fears, instincts, and narrow 
affections. The history of our race and personal religious ex- 
perience run so closely parallel as to seem to a modern observer 
almost the same thing; both tell of a being at first scattered and 
blind and utterly confused, feeling its way slowly to the serenity 
and salvation of an ordered and coherent purpose. That, in the 
simplest, is the outline of history ; whether one have a religious 
purpose or disavow a religious purpose altogether, the lines of 
the outline remain the same. 

§ 4 

In the year 30 a.d., while Tiberius, the second emperor, was 
Emperor of Eome and Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, 
a little while before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus of Naza- 
reth came into Jerusalem. Probably he came then for the first 
time. Hitherto he had been preaching chiefly in Galilee, and 
for the most part round and about the town of Capernaum. In 
Capernaum he had preached in the synagogue. 

His entry into Jerusalem was a pacific triumph. He had 
gathered a great following in Galilee — he had sometimes to 
preach from a boat upon the Lake of Galilee, because of the 
pressure of the crowd upon the shore — and his fame had spread 

* "Stt. Paul understood what most Christians never realize, namely, that 
the Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its most 
universal and deepest significance." — Dean Inge in Outspoken Essays^. 



508 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

before him to the capital. Great crowds came out to greet him. 
It is clear they did not understand the drift of his teaching, and 
that they shared the general persuasion that by some magic of 
righteousness he was going to overthrow the established order. 
He rode into the city upon the foal of an ass that had been bor- 
rowed by his disciples. The crowd accompanied him with cries 
of triumph and shouts of "Hosanna," a word of rejoicing. 

He went to the temple. Its outer courts were cumbered with 
the tables of money-changers and with the stalls of those who 
sold doves to be liberated by pious visitors to the temple. These 
traders upon religion he and his followers cast out, overturning 
the tables. It was almost his only act of positive rule. 

Then for a week he taught in Jerusalem, surrounded by a 
crowd of followers who made his arrest by the authorities diffi- 
cult. Then officialdom gathered itself together against this 
astonishing intruder. One of his disciples, Judas, dismayed and 
disappointed at the apparent ineffectiveness of this capture of 
Jerusalem, went to the Jewish priests to give them his advice 
and help in the arrest of Jesus. For this service he was re- 
warded with thirty pieces of silver. The high priest and the 
Jews generally had many reasons for dismay at this gentle in- 
surrection that was filling the streets with excited crowds; for 
example, the Romans might misunderstand it or use it as an 
occasion to do some mischief to the whole Jewish people. Ac- 
cordingly the high priest Caiaphas, in his anxiety to show his 
loyalty to the Roman overlord, was the leader in the pro- 
ceedings against this unarmed Messiah, and the priests and 
the orthodox mob of Jerusalem the chief accusers of Jesus. 

How he was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, how he 
was tried and sentenced by Pontius Pilate, the Roman procura- 
tor, how he was scourged and mocked by the Roman soldiers 
and crucified upon the hill called Golgotha, is told with unsur- 
passable simplicity and dignity in the gospels. 

The revolution collapsed utterly. The disciples of Jesus with 
one accord deserted him, and Peter, being taxed as one of them, 
said, ''I know not the man," This was not the end they had 
anticipated in their great coming to Jerusalem. His last hours 
of aching pain ai:d thirst upon the cross were watched only by 
a few women and near friends. Towards the end of the long 
day of suffering this abandoned leader roused himself to one 
supreme effort, cried out with a loud voice, "My God ! my 



I 



I 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 509 

God ! why lias thou forsaken me ?" and, leaving these words 
to echo down the ages, a perpetual riddle to the faithful, 
died. 

It was inevitable that simple believers should have tried to 
enhance the stark terrors of this tragedy by foolish stories of 
physical disturbances similar to those which had been invented 
to emphasize the conversion of Gautama. We are told that a 
great darkness fell upon the earth, and that the veil of the temple 
was rent in twain ; but if indeed these things occurred, they 
produced not the slightest effect upon the minds of people in 
Jerusalem at that time. It is difficult to believe nowadays that 
the order of nature indulged in any such meaningless comments. 
Far more tremendous is it to suppose a world apparently in- 
different to those three crosses in the red evening twilight, and 
to the little group of perplexed and desolated watchers. The 
darkness closed upon the hill ; the distant city set about its prep- 
arations for the Passover; scarcely anyone but that knot of 
mourners on the way to their homes troubled whether Jesus of 
Nazareth was still dying or already dead. . . . 

The souls of the disciples were plunged for a time into utter 
darkness. Then presently came a whisper among them and 
stories, rather discrepant stories, that the body of Jesus was 
not in the tomb in which it had been placed, and that first one 
and then another had seen him alive. Soon they were consoling 
themselves with the conviction that he had risen from the dead, 
that he had shown himself to many, and had ascended visibly 
into heaven. Witnesses were found to declare that they had 
positively seen him go up, visibly in his body. He had gone 
through the blue — to God. Soon they had convinced themselves 
that he would presently come again, in power and glory, to 
judge all mankind. In a little while, they said, he would come 
back to them ; and in these bright revivals of their old-time 
dream of an assertive and temporal splendour they forgot the 
greater measure, the giant measure, he had given them of the 
Kingdom of God. 



The story of the early beginnings of Christianity is the story 
of the struggle between the real teachings and spirit of Jesus of 
Nazareth and the limitations, amplifications, and misunder- 



X 



510 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

standings of the very inferior men who had loved and followed 
him from Galilee, and who were now the bearers and custodians 
of his message to mankind. The gospels and the Acts of the 
Apostles present a patched and uneven record, but there can be 
little question that on the whole it is a quite honest record of 
those early days. 

The early Nazarenes, as the followers of Jesus were called, 
present from the first a spectacle of a great confusion between 
these two strands, his teaching on the one hand, and the glosses 
and interpretations of the disciples on the other. They con- 
tinued for a time his disciplines of the complete subjugation of 
self; they had their goods in common, they had no bond but 
love. Nevertheless, they built their faith upon the stories that 
were told of his resurrection and magical ascension, and the 
promised return. Few of them understood that the renunciation 
of self is its own reward, that it is itself the Kingdom of 
Heaven; they regarded it as a sacrifice that entitled them to 
the compensation of power and dominion when presently the 
second coming occurred. They had now all identified Je«us 
with the promised Christ, the Messiah so long expected by the 
Jewish people. They found out prophecies of the crucifixion 
in the prophets — the Gospel of Matthew is particularly insistent 
upon these prophecies. Revived by these hopes, enforced by the 
sweet and pure lives of many of the believers, the Nazarene doc- 
trine began to spread very rapidly in Judea and Syria. 

And presently there arose a second great teacher, whom many 
modem authorities regard as the real founder of Christianity, 
Saul of Tarsus, or Paul. Saul apparently was his Jewish and 
Paul his Roman name; he was a Roman citizen, and a man 
of much wider education and a much narrower intellectuality 
than Jesus seems to have been. By birth he was probably a 
Jew, though some Jewish w^riters deny this ; he had certainly 
studied under Jewish teachers. But he was well versed in the 
Hellenic theologies of Alexandria, and his language was Greek. 
Some classical scholars profess to find his Greek unsatisfactorv' ; 
he did not use the Greek of Athens, but the Greek of Alexandria ; 
but he used it with power and freedom.^ He was a religious 
theorist and teacher long before he heard of Jesus of Nazareth, 

^Paul's Greek is very good. He is aflFected by the philosophical jargon 
of the Hellenistic schools and by that of Stoicism. But his mastery of 
sublime language is amazing. — G. M. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 511 

and he appears in the New Testament narrative at first as the 
bitter critic and antagonist of the Nazarenes. 

The present writer has been unable to find any discussion of 
the religious ideas of Paul before he became a follower of Jesus. 
They must have been a basis, if only a basis of departure, for 
his new views, and their phraseology certainly supplied the 
colour of his new doctrines. We are almost equally in the 
dark as to the teachings of Gamaliel, who is named as the 
Jewish teacher at whose feet he sat. Nor do we know what 
Gentile teachings had reached him. It is highly probable that 
he had been influenced by Mithraism. He uses phrases curi- 
ously like Mithraistic phrases. What will be clear to anyone 
who reads his various Epistles, side by side with the Gospels, 
is that his mind was saturated by an idea which does not appear 
at all prominently in the reported sayings and teachings of 
Jesus, the idea of a sacrificial person, who is offered up to God 
as an atonement for sin. What Jesus preached was a new birth 
of the human soul ; what Paul preached was the ancient re- 
ligion of priest and altar and propitiatory bloodshed. Jesus 
was to him the Easter lamb, that traditional human victim 
without spot or blemish who haunts all the religions of the dark 
white peoples. Paul came to the Nazarenes with overwhelming 
force because he came to them with this completely satisfactory 
explanation of the disaster of the crucifixion. It was a brilliant 
elucidation of what had been utterly perplexing. 

Paul had never seen Jesus. His knowledge of Jesus and his 
teaching must have been derived from the hearsay of the original 
disciples. It is clear that he apprehended much of the spirit of 
Jesus and his doctrine of a new birth, but he built this into a 
theological system, a very subtle and ingenious system, whose 
appeal to this day is chiefly intellectual. And it is clear that 
the faith of the Nazarenes, which he found as a doctrine of 
motive and a way of living, he made into a doctrine of belief. 
He found the Nazarenes with a spirit and hope, and he left 
them Christians with the beginning of a creed. 

But we must refer the reader to the Acts of the Apostles and 
the Pauline Epistles for an account of Paul's mission and teach- 
ing. He was a man of enormous energy, and he taught at Jeru- 
salem, Antioch, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Eome. 

Possibly he went into Spain. The manner of his death is 
not certainly known, but it is said that he was killed in Rome 



512 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

during the reign of Xero. A great fire had burnt a large part 
of Rome, and the new sect was accused of causing this. The 
rapid spread of Christian teaching certainly owes more to Paul 
than to any other single man. Within two decades of the cruci- 
fixion this new religion was already attracting the attention of 
the Roman rulers in several provinces. If it had acquired a 
theology in the hands of St. Paul, it still retained much of 
the revolutionary and elementary quality of the teachings of 
Jesus. It had become somewhat more tolerant of private prop- 
erty; it would accept wealthy adherents without insisting upon 
the communization of their riches, and St. Paul has condoned 
the institution of slavery ("Slaves, be obedient to your mas- 
ters"), but it still set its face like flint against certain funda- 
mental institutions of the Roman world. It would not tolerate 
the godhead of Ciesar; not even by a mute gesture at the altar 
would the Christians consent to worship the Emperor, though 
their lives were at stake in the matter. It denounced the gladia- 
torial shows. Unarmed, but possessing enormous powers of 
passive resistance, Christianity thus appeared at the outset 
plainly as rebellion, striking at the political if not at 
the economic essentials of the imperial system. The first 
evidences of Christianity in non-Christian literature we find 
when perplexed Roman officials began to write to one another 
and exchange views upon the strange problem presented by this 
infectious rebellion of otherwise harmless people. 

Much of the history of the Christians in the first two cen- 
turies of the Christian era is very obscure. They spread far and 
wide throughout the world, but we know very little of their ideas 
or their ceremonies and methods during that time. As yet they 
had no settled creeds, and there can be little doubt that there 
were wide local variations in their beliefs and disciplines during 
this formless period. But whatever their local differences, 
everywhere they seem to have carried much of the spirit of 
Jesus; and though everywhere they aroused bitter enmity and 
a-ctive counter-propaganda, the very charges made against them 
witness to the general goodness of their lives. 

During this indefinite time a considerable amount of a sort 
of theoerasia seems to have gone on between the Christian cult 
and the almost equally popular and widely diffused Mithraic 
cult, and the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus. From the former it 
would seem the Christians adopted Sun-day as their chief day 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 513 

of worship instead of the Jewish Sabbath, the abundant use of 
candles in religious ceremonies, the legend of the adoration 
by the shepherds, and probably also those ideas and phrases, so 
distinctive of certain sects to this day, about being "washed in 
the blood" of Christ, and of Christ being a blood sacrifice. For 
we have to remember that a death by crucifixion is hardly a more 
bloody death than hanging; to speak of Jesus shedding his 
blood for mankind is really a most inaccurate expression. Even 
when we remember that he was scourged, that he wore a crown 
of thorns, and that his side was pierced by a spear, we are still 
far from a ''fountain filled with blood." But Mithraism cen- 
tred upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras sacri- 
ficing a sacred and benevolent bull; all the Mithraic shrines 
seem to have contained a figure of Mithras killing this bull, 
which bleeds copiously from a wound in its side, and from this 
blood a new life sprang. The Mithraist votary actually bathed 
in the blood of the sacrificial bull, and was ''born again" 
thereby. At his initiation he went beneath a scaffolding on 
which the bull was killed, and the blood ran down on him. 

The contributions of the Alexandrine cult to Christian thought 
and practices were even more considerable. In the personality 
of Horus, who was at once the son of Serapis and identical with 
Serapis, it was natural for the Christians to find an illuminating 
analogue in their struggles with the Pauline mysteries. From 
that to the identification of Mary with Isis, and her elevation to 
a rank quasi-divine — in spite of the saying of Jesus about his 
mother and his brothers that we have already quoted — was also 
a very natural step. Natural, too, was it for Christianity to 
adopt, almost insensibly, the practical methods of the popular 
religions of the time. Its priests took on the head-shaving and 
the characteristic garments of the Egyptian priests, because that 
sort of thing seemed to be the right way of distinguishing a 
priest. One accretion followed another. Almost insensibly 
the originally revolutionary teaching was buried under these 
customary acquisitions. We have already tried to imagine 
Gautama Buddha returning to Tibet, and his amazement at 
the worship of his own image in Lhassa. We will but suggest 
the parallel amazement of some earnest Nazarene who had 
known and followed his dusty and travel-worn Master through 
the dry sunlight of Galilee, restored suddenly to this world and 
visiting, let us say, a mass in St. Peter's at Rome, at learning 



514 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

that the consecrated wafer upon the altar was none other than 
his crncified teacher. 

Religion in a world community is not many things but one 
thing, and it was inevitable that all the living religious faiths 
in the world at the time, and all the philosophy and religious 
thought that came into contact with Christianity, should come 
to an account with Christianity and exchange phrases and ideas. 
The hopes of the early I^azarenes had identified Jesus with the 
Christ ; the brilliant mind of Paul had surrounded his career 
with mystical significance. Jesus had called men and women 
to a giant undertaking, to the renunciation of self, to the new 
birth into the kingdom of love. The line of least resistance for 
the flagging convert was to intellectualize himself away from 
this plain doctrine, this stark proposition, into complicated 
theories and ceremonies — that would leave his essential self 
alone. How much easier is it to sprinkle oneself with blood 
than to purge oneself from malice and competition ; to eat 
bread and drink wine and pretend one had absorbed divinity, 
to give candlee rather than the heart, to shave the head and 
retain the scheming privacy of the brain inside it ! The world 
was full of such evasive philosophy and theological stuff in the 
opening centuries of the Christian era. It is not for us here to 
enlarge upon the distinctive features of Neoplatonism, Gnosti- 
cism, Philonism, and the like teachings which abounded in the 
Alexandrian world. But it was all one world with that in 
which the early Christians were living. The writings of such 
men as Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine witness to the inevitable 
give and take of the time. 

Jesus called himself the Son of God and also the Son of 
^lan ; but he laid little stress on who he was or what he was, 
and much upon the teachings of the Kingdom. In declaring 
that he was more than a man and divine, Paul and his other 
followers, whether they were right or wrong, opened up a vast 
field of argument. Was Jesus God ? Or had God created him ? 
Was he identical with God or separate from God ? It is not 
the function of the historian to answer such questions, but he 
is bound to note them, and to note how unavoidable they were, 
because of the immense influence they have had upon the whole 
subsequent life of western mankind. By the fourth century 
of the Christian Era we find all the Christian communities so 
agitated and exasperated by tortuous and elusive arguments 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 515 

about the nature of God as to be largely negligent of the simpler 
teachings of charity, service, and brotherhood that Jesus had 
inculcated. 

The chief views that the historian notices are those of the 
Arians, the Sabellians, and the Trinitarians. The Arians fol- 
lowed Arius, who taught that Christ was less than God; the 
Sabellians taught that he was a mode or aspect of God ; God 
was Creator, Saviour, and Comforter just as one man may 
be father, trustee, and guest; the Trinitarians, of whom Atha- 
nasius was the great leader, taught that the Father, the Son, 
and the Holy Ghost were three distinct Persons, but one God. 
The reader is referred to the Athanasian Creed ^ for the exact 
expression of the latter mystery, and for the alarming conse- 
quences to him of any failure to gi'asp and believe it. To 
Gibbon he must go for a derisive statement of these controver- 
sies. The present writer can deal with them neither with awe 
nor derision ; they seem to him, he must confess, a disastrous 
ebullition of the human mind entirely inconsistent with the plain 
account of Jesus preserved for us in the gospels. Orthodoxy 
became a test not only for Christian office, but for Christian 
trade and help. A small point of doctrine might mean affluence 
or beggary to a man. It is difficult to read the surviving litera- 
ture of the time without a strong sense of the dogmatism, the 
spites, rivalries, and pedantries of the men who tore Christianity 
to pieces for the sake of these theological refinements. Most of ,v^ 
the Trinitarian disputants — for it is chiefly Trinitarian docu- 
ments that survive — accuse their antagonists, probably with 
truth, of mean and secondary motives, but they do so in a man- 
ner that betrays their own base spirit very clearly. Arius, for 
example, is accused of adopting heretical opinions because he 
was not appointed Bishop of Alexandria. Riots and excom- 
munications and banishments punctuated these controversies, 
and finally came official persecutions. These fine differences 
about the constitution of the Deity interwove with politics and 
international disputes. Men who quarrelled over business af- 
fairs, wives who wished to annoy their husbands, developed 
antagonistic views upon this exalted theme. Most of the bar- 
barian invaders of the empire were Arians; probably because 

' In any prayer book of the Episcopalian Church. The Athanasian 
Creed embodies the view of Athanasius, but probably was not composed 
by him. 



516 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

their simple minds foimd the Trinitarian position incompre- 
hensible. 

It is easy for the sceptic to mock at these disputes. But even 
if we think that these attempts to say exactly how God was 
related to himself were presumptuous and intellectually mon- 
strous, nevertheless we are bound to recognize that beneath these 
preposterous refinements of impossible dogmas there lay often 
a real passion for truth — even if it was truth ill conceived. 
Both sides produced genuine martyrs. And the zeal of these 
controversies, though it is a base and often malicious zeal, did 
at any rate make the Christian sects very energetically propa- 
gandist and educational. Moreover, because the history of the 
Christian body in the fourth and fifth centuries is largely a 
record of these unhappy disputes, that must not blind us to 
the fact that the spirit of Jesus did live and ennoble many lives 
among the Christians. The text of the gospels, though it was 
probably tampered with during this period, was not destroyed, 
and Jesus of Nazareth, in his own manifest inimitable great- 
ness, still taught through that text. Nor did these unhappy 
quarrels prevent Christianity from maintaining a united front 
against gladiatorial shows and against the degrading worship of 
idols and of the god-Caesar. 

§ 6 

So far as it challenged the divinity of Caesar and the char- 
acteristic institutions of the empire, Christianity is to be re- 
garded as a rebellious and disintegrating movement, and so it 
was regarded by most of the emperors before Constantine the 
Great. It encountered considerable hostility, and at last sys- 
tematic attempts to suppress it. Decius was the first emperor 
to organize an official persecution, and the great era of the 
martyrs was in the time of Diocletian (303 and following years). 
The persecution of Diocletian was indeed the crowning strug- 
gle of the old idea of the god-emperor against the already great 
and powerful organization that denied his divinity. Diocle- 
tian had reorganized the monarchy upon lines of extreme 
absolutism ; he had abolished the last vestiges of republican 
institutions ; he was the first emperor to surround himself com- 
pletely with the awe-inspiring etiquette of an eastern monarch. 
He was forced by the logic of his assumptions to attempt the 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 517 

complete eradication of a system that flatly denied tbem. The 
test in the persecution was that the Christian was required to 
offer sacrifice to the emperor. 

"Though Diocletian, still averse to the effusion of blood, had 
moderated the fury of Galerius, who proposed that everyone 
refusing to offer sacrifice should immediately be burnt alive, 
the penalties inflicted on the obstinacy of the Christians might 
be deemed sufficiently rigorous and effectual. It was enacted 
tbat their churches, in all the provinces of the empire, should 
be demolished to their foundations ; and the punishment of 
death was denounced against all who should presume to hold 
any secret assemblies for the purpose of religious worship. The 
philosophers, who now assumed the unworthy office of directing 
the blind zeal of persecution, had diligently studied the nature 
and genius of the Christian religion; and as they were not 
ignorant that the speculative doctrines of the faith were sup- 
posed to be contained in the writings of the prophets, of the 
evangelists, and of the apostles, they most probably suggested 
the order that the bishops and presbyters should deliver all their 
sacred books into the hands of the magistrates, who were com- 
manded, under the severest penalties, to burn them in a public 
and solemn manner. By the same edict, the property of the 
church was at once confiscated ; and the several parts of which 
it might consist were either sold to the highest bidder, united 
to the imperial domain, bestowed on the cities or corporations, 
or granted to the solicitations of rapacious courtiers. After 
taking such effectual measures to abolish the worship, and to 
dissolve the government of the Christians, it was thought neces- 
sary to subject to the most intolerable hardships the condition 
of those perverse individuals who should still reject the religion 
of nature, of Kome, and of their ancestors. Persons of a 
liberal birth were declared incapable of holding any honours or 
employments; slaves were for ever deprived of the hopes of 
freedom ; and the whole body of the Christians were put out of 
the protection of the law. The judges were authorized to hear 
and to determine every action that was brought again&t a 
Christian ; but the Christians were not permitted to complain 
of any injury which they themselves had suffered; and those 
unfortunate sectaries were exposed to the severity, while they 
were excluded from the benefits, of public justice. . . . This 
edict was scarcely exhibited to the public view, in the most con- 



518 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

spicuous place in IsTicomedia, before it was torn down by the 
hands of a Christian, who expressed at the same time^ by the 
bitterest of invectives, his contempt as well as abhorrence for 
such impious and tyrannical governors. His offence, according 
to the mildest laws, amounted to treason, and deserved death, 
and if it be true that he was a person of rank and education, 
those circumstances could serve only to aggravate his guilt. He 
was burnt, or rather roasted, by a slow fire; and his execu- 
tioners, zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been 
offered to the emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty 
without being able to subdue his patience, or to alter the steady 
and insulting smile which in his dying agonies he still pre- 
sei^ed in his countenance." ^ 

So with the death of this unnamed martyr the great persecu- 
tion opened. But, as Gibbon points out, our information as to 
its severity is of very doubtful value. He estimates the total 
of victims as about two thousand, and contrasts this with the 
known multitudes of Christians martyred by their fellow-Chris- 
tians during the period of the Eeformation. Gibbon was 
strongly prejudiced against Christianity, and here he seems 
disposed to minimize the fortitude and sufferings of the Chris- 
tians, In many provinces, no doubt, there must have been a 
great reluctance to enforce the edict. But there was a hunt 
for the copies of Holy Writ, and in many places a systematic 
destruction of Christian churches. There were tortures and 
executions, as well as a great crowding of the gaols with Chris- 
tian presbyters and bishops. We have to remember that the 
Christian community was now a very considerable element of 
the population, and that an influential proportion of the oSicials 
charged with the execution of the edict were themselves of the 
proscribed faith. Gelerius, who was in control of the eastern 
provinces, was among the most vigorous of the persecutors, but 
in the end, on his death bed (371), he realized the futility of 
his attacks upon this huge community, and granted toleration 
in an edict, the gist of which Gibbon translates as follows : — 

''Among the important cares which have occupied our mind 
for the utility and preservation of the empire, it was our inten- 
tion to correct and re-establish all things according to the ancient 
laws and public discipline of the Romans. We were particu- 
larly desirous of reclaiming into the way of reason and nature 
'Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xvi. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 519 

the deluded Christians who had renounced the religion and 
ceremonies instituted by their fathers ; and presumptuously de- 
spising the practice of antiquity, had invented extravagant laws 
and opinions according to the dictates of their fancy, and had 
collected a various society from the different provinces of our 
empire. The edicts which we have published to enforce the 
worship of the gods having exposed many of the Christians to 
danger and distress, many having suifered death, and many 
more who still persist in their impious folly, being left destitute 
of any public exercise of religion, we are disposed to extend to 
those uidiappy men the effects of our wonted clemency. We 
permit them, therefore, freely to profess their private opinions 
and to assemble in their conventicles without fear or molesta- 
tion, provided always that they preserve a due respect to the 
established laws and govenmient. By another rescript we shall 
sigTiify our intentions to the judges and magistrates ; and we 
hope that our indulgence will engage the Christians to offer up 
their prayers to the deity whom they adore, for our safety and 
prosperity, for their own, and for that of the republic." 

In a few years Constantino the Great was reigning, first as 
associated emperor (312) and then as the sole ruler (324), 
and the severer trials of Christianity were over. If Chris- 
tianity was a rebellious and destructive force towards a pagan 
Rome, it was a unifying and organizing force within its own 
communion. This fact the genius of Constantine grasped. 
The spirit of Jesus, for all the doctrinal dissensions that pre- 
vailed, made a great freemasonry throughout and even beyond 
the limits of the empire. The faith was spreading among the 
barbarians beyond the border ; it had extended into Persia and 
Central Asia. It provided the only hope of moral solidarity he 
could discern in the great welter of narrow views and self- 
seeking over which he had to rule. It, and it alone, had the 
facilities for organizing will, for the need of which the empire 
was falling to pieces like a piece of rotten cloth. In 312 Con- 
stantine had to fight for Rome and his position against Maxen- 
tius. He put the Christian monogTam upon the shields and 
banners of his troops and claimed that the God of the Chris- 
tians had fought for him in his complete victory at the battle 
of the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome. By this act he 
renounced all those pretensions to divinity that the vanity of 
Alexander the Great had first brought into the western world, 



520 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and with the applause and enthusiastic support of the Chris- 
tians he established himself as a monarch more absolute even 
than Diocletian. 

In a few years' time Christianity had become the official 
religion of the empire, and in a.d. 337 Constantiue upon his 
death-bed was baptized as a Christian. 



The figure of Constantine the Great is at least as cardinal in 
history as that of Alexander the Great or Augustus Ciesar. 
We know very little of his personality or of his private life; 
no Plutarch, no Suetonius, has preserved any intimate and 
living details about him. Abuse we have of him from his 
enemies, and much obviously fulsome panegyric to set against 
it ; but none of these writers give us a living character of him' ; 
he is a party symbol for them, a partisan flag. It is stated 
by the hostile Zosimus that, like Sargon I, he was of illegitimate 
birth; his father was a distingiiished general and his mother, 
Helena, an inkeeper's daughter of Nish in Serbia. Gibbon, 
however, is of opinion that there was a valid marriage. In 
any case it was a lowly marriage, and the personal genius of 
Constantine prevailed against serious disadvantages. He was 
comparatively illiterate, he knew little or no Greek. It ap- 
pears to be true that he banished his eldest son Crispus, and 
caused him to be executed at the instigation of the young man's 
stepmother, Fausta ; and it is also recorded that he was after- 
wards convinced of the innocence of Crispus, and caused Fausta 
to be executed — according to one account by being boiled to 
death in her bath, and according to another by being exposed 
naked to wild beasts on a desolate mountain — ^wliile there is 
also very satisfactory documentary evidence that she survived 
him. If she was executed, the fact remains that her three 
sons, together with two nephews, became the appointed heirs 
of Constantine. Clearly there is nothing solid to be got from 
this libellous tangle, and such souftie as is possible with these 
scanty materials is to be found admirably done by Gibbon 
(chap, xviii.). Gibbon, because of his anti-Christian animus, 
is hostile to Constantine; but he admits that he was temperate 
and chaste. He accuses him of prodigality because of his 
great public buildings, and of being vain and dissolute (!) 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 521 

because in his old age he wore a wig — Gibbon wore his own 
hair tied with a becoming black bow — and a diadem and mag- 
nificent robes. But all the later emperors after Diocletian wore 
diadems and magnificent robes. 

Yet if the personality of Constantine the Great remains 
phantom-like, if the particulars of his domestic life reveal noth- 
ing but a vague tragedy, we can still guess at much that was 
in his mind. It must, in the closing years of his life, have 
been a very lonely mind. He was more of an autocrat than 
any previous emperor had been — that is to say, he had less coun- 
sel and help. No class of public-spirited and trustworthy men 
remained ; no senate nor council shared and developed his 
schemes. How much he apprehended the geographical weak- 
ness of the empire, how far he saw the complete disaster that 
was now so near, we can only guess. He made his real capital 
at Nicomedia in Bithynia ; Constantinople across the Bos- 
phorus was still being built when he died. Like Diocletian, he 
seems to have realized the broken-backed outline of his domin- 
ions, and to have concentrated his attention on foreign affairs 
and more particularly on the affairs of Hungary, South 
Russia, and the Black Sea. He reorganized all the 
official machinery of the empire ; he gave it a new con- 
stitution and sought to establish a dynasty. He was a rest- 
less remaker of things ; the social confusion he tried to fix by 
assisting in the development of a caste system. This was fol- 
lowing up the work of his great predecessor, Diocletian. He 
tried to make a caste of the peasants and small cultivators, and 
to restrict them from moving from their holdings. In fact 
he sought to make them serfs. The supply of slave labour 
had fallen off" because the empire was no longer an invading 
but an invaded power ; he turned to serfdom as the remedy. 
His creative efforts necessitated unprecedentedly heavy taxa- 
tion. All these things point to a lonely and forcible mind. It 
is in his manifest understanding of the need of some unifying 
moral force if the empire was to hold together that his claim 
to originality lies. 

It was only after he had turned to Christianity that he seems 
to have realized the fierce dissensions of the theologians. He 
made a great effort to reconcile these differences in order to 
have one uniform and harmonious teaching in the community, 
and at his initiative a general council of the Church was held 



522 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

at Xicsea, a town near Nicomedia and over against Constanti- 
nople, in 325. Eusebius gives a curious account of this strange 
gathering, over which the Emperor, although he was not yet 
a baptized Christian, presided. It was not his first council 
of the Church, for he had already (in 313) presided over a 
council at Aries. He sat in the midst of the council of i^icsea 
upon a golden throne, and as he had little Greek, we must sup- 
pose he was reduced to watching the countenances and gestures 
of the debaters, and listening to their intonations. The council 
was a stormy one. When old Arius rose to speak, one Nicholas 
of Myra struck him in the face, and afterwards many ran out, 
thrusting their fingers into their ears in affected horror at the 
old man's heresies. One is tempted to imagine the great Em- 
peror, deeply anxious for the soul of his empire, firmly re^- 
solved to end these divisions, bending towards his interpreters 
to ask them the meaning of the uproar. 

The views that prevailed at ISTicsea are embodied in the Nicene 
Creed, a strictly Trinitarian statement, and the Emperor sus- 
tained the Trinitarian position. But afterwards, when Athana- 
sius bore too hardly upon the Arians, he had him banished from 
Alexandria ; and when the church at Alexandria would have 
excommunicated Arius, he obliged it to readmit him to 
communion. 



This date 325 a.d. is a very convenient date in our history. 
It is the date of the first complete general ("cecumenical") 
council of the entire Christian world. (That at Aries we have 
mentioned had been a gathering of only the v/estern half.) It 
marks the definite entry upon the stage of human affairs of the 
Christian church and of Christianity as it is generally under- 
stood in the world to-day. It marks the exact definition of 
Christian teaching by the Nicene Creed. 

It is necessary that we should recall the reader's attention 
to the profound differences between this fully developed Chris- 
tianity of Mcsea and the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. All 
Christians hold that the latter is completely contained in the 
former, but that is a question outside our province. What is 
clearly apparent is that the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth was a 
prophetic teaching of the new type that began with the Hebrew 
prophets. It was not priestly, it had no consecrated temple and 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 523 

no altar. It had no rites and ceremonies. Its sacrifice was "a 
broken and a contrite heart." Its only organization was an 
organization of preachers, and its chief function was the ser- 
mon. But the fully fledged Christianity of the fourth century, 
though it preserved as its nucleus the teachings of Jesus in the 
gospels, was mainly a priestly religion of a type already familiar 
to the world for thousand of years. The centre of its elaborate 
ritual was an altar, and the essential act of worship the sacri- 
fice, by a consecrated priest, of the mass. And it had a rapidly 
developing organization of deacons, priests, and bishops. 

But if Christianity had taken on an extraordinary outward 
resemblance to the cults of Serapis, Ammon, or Bel-Marduk, 
we must remember that even its priestcraft had certain novel 
features. ISTowhere did it possess any quasi-divine image of 
God. There was no head temple containing the god, because 
God was everywhere. There was no holy of holies. Its wide- 
spread altars were all addressed to the unseen universal Trinity. 
Even in its most archaic aspects there was in Christianity some- 
thing new. 

A very important thing for us to note is the role played by 
the Emperor in the fixation of Christianity. Not only was the 
council of Nica?a assembled by Constantino the Great, but all 
the great councils, the two at Constantinople (381 and 553), 
Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), were called together by 
the imperial power. And it is very manifest that in much of 
the history of Christianity at this time the spirit of Constantino 
the Great is as evident as, or more evident, than the spirit of 
Jesus. He was, we have said, a pure autocrat. The last ves- 
tiges of Roman republicanism had vanished in the days of 
Aurelian and Diocletian. To the best of his lights he was 
trying to remake the crazy empire while there was yet 
time, and he worked without any councillors, any public 
opinion, or any sense of the need of such aids and checks. 
The idea of stamping out all controversy and division, stamp- 
ing out all thought, by imposing one dogmatic creed upon all 
believers, is an altogether autocratic idea, it is the idea of the 
single-handed man who feels that to work at all he must be 
free from opposition and criticism. The history of the Church 
under his influence becomes now therefore a history of the vio- 
lent struggles that were bound to follow upon his sudden and 
rough summons to unanimity. From him the Church acquired 



524 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the disposition to be authoritative and unquestioned, to develop 
a centralized organization and run parallel to the empire. 

A second great autocrat who presently contributed to the 
stamping upon Catholic Christianity of a distinctly authorita- 
tive character was Theodosius I, Theodosius the Great (379- 
395). He forbade the unorthodox to hold meetings, handed 
over all churches to the Trinitarians, and overthrew the heathen 
temples, throughout the empire, and in 390 he caused the great 
statue of Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. There was 
to be no rivalry, no qualification to the rigid unity of the 
Church. 

Here we cannot tell of the vast internal troubles of the 
Church, its indigestions of heresy; of Arians and Paulicians, 
of Gnostics and Manicheans. Had it been less authoritative 
and more tolerant of intellectual variety, it might perhaps have 
been a still more powerful- body than it became. But, in spite 
of all these disorders, it did for some time maintain a con- 
ception of human unity more intimate and far wider than was 
ever achieved before. By the fifth century Christendom was 
already becoming gi-eater, sturdier, and more enduring than 
any empire had ever been, because it was something not merely 
imposed upon men, but interwoven with the texture of their 
minds. It reached out far beyond the utmost limits of the 
empire, into Armenia, Persia, Abyssinia, Ireland, Germany, 
India, and Turkestan. "Though made up of widely scattered 
congregations, it was thought of as one body of Christ, one 
people of God. This ideal unity found expression in many 
ways. Intercommunication between the various Christian com- 
munities was very active. Christians upon a journey were al- 
ways sure of a warm welcome and hospitable entertainment 
from their fellow-disciples. Messengers and letters were sent 
freely from one church to another. Missionaries and evan- 
gelists went continually from place to place. Documents of 
various kinds, including gospels and apostolic epistles, circu- 
lated widely. Thus in various ways the feeling of unity found 
expression, and the development of widely separated parts of 
Christendom conformed more or less closely to a common type." ^ 

Christendom retained at least the formal tradition of this 
general unity of spirit until 1054, when the Latin-speaking 
Western church and the main and original Greek-speaking 
'^ Encyclopcedia Britannica, art. "Church History," p. 336. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 525 

church, the ''Orthodox" church, severed themselves from one 
another, ostensihly upon the question of adding two words to 
the. creed. The older creed had declared that the "Holy Ghost 
proceeded from the Father." The Latins wanted to add, and did 
add "Filloque" (= and from the son), and placed the Greeks 
out of their communion because they would not follow this lead. 
But already as early as the fifth century the Christians in 
Eastera Syria, Persia, Central Asia — there were churches at 
Merv, Herat, and Samarkand— and India had detached them- 
selves on a similar score. These extremely interesting Asiatic 
Christians are known in history as the Nestorian Church, and 
their influence extended into China. The Egyptian and Abys- 
sinian churches also detached themselves very early upon simi- 
larly inexplicable points. Long before this formal separation 
of the Latin and Greek-speaking halves of the main church, 
however, there was a practical separation following upon the 
breaking up of the empire. Their conditions diverged from 
the first. While the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire held to- 
gether and the emperor at Constantinople remained dominant in 
the Church, the Latin half of the empire, as we have already 
told, collapsed, and left the Church free of any such imperial 
control. Moreover, while ecclesiastical authority in the empire 
of Constantinople was divided between the high-bishops, or 
patriarchs, of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusa- 
lem, authority in the West was concentrated in the Patriarch, 
or Pope, of Rome. The Bishop of Rome had always been 
recognized as first among the patriarchs, and all these things 
conspired to justify exceptional pretensions upon his part to 
a quasi-imperial authority. With the final fall of the Western 
Empire, he took over the ancient title of pontifex maximus 
which the emperors had held, and so became the supreme sacri- 
ficial priest of the Roman tradition. Over the Christians of 
the West his supremacy was fully recognized, but from the 
beginning it had to be urged with discretion within the domin- 
ions of the Eastern emperor and the jurisdictions of the other 
four patriarchs. 

Ideas of worldly rule by the Church were already prevalent 
in the fourth century. St. Augustine, a citizen of Hippo 
in North Africa, who wrote between 354 and 430, gave expres- 
sion to the developing political ideas of the Church in his book 
The City of God. The City of Ood leads the mind very di- 



526 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

rectly towards the possibility of making the world into a theo- 
logical and organized Kingdom of Heaven. The city, as 
Augustine pnts it, is "a spiritual society of the predestined 
faithful," but the step from that to a political application was 
not a very wide one. The Church was to be the ruler of the 
world over all nations, the divinely led ruling power over a 
great league of terrestrial states. In later years these ideas 
developed into a definite political theory and policy. As the 
barbarian races settled and became Christian, the Pope began 
to claim an overlordship of their kings. In a few centuries 
the Pope had become in theory, and to a certain extent in 
practice, the high priest, censor, judge, and divine monarch 
of Christendom; his influence extended in the west far be- 
yond the utmost range of the old empire, to Ireland, Norway 
and Sweden, and over all Germany. For more than a thou- 
sand years this idea of the unity of Christendom^ of Christen- 
dom as a sort of vast Amphictyony, whose members even in 
war time were restrained from many extremities by the idea 
of a common brotherhood and a common loyalty to the Church, 
dominated Europe. The history of Europe from the fifth 
century onward to the fifteenth is very largely the history of 
the failure of this great idea of a divine world government to 
realize itself in practice. 



We have already given an account in the previous chapter 
of the chief irruptions of the barbarian races. We may now, 
with the help of a map, make a brief review of the political 
divisions of Europe at the close of the fifth century. No 
vestige of the Western Empire, the original Roman Empire, 
remained as a distinct and separate political division. Po- 
litically it was completely broken up. Over many parts of 
Europe a sort of legendary overlordship of the Hellenic East- 
ern Empire as the Empire held its place in men's minds. The 
emperor at Constantinople was, in theory at least, still emperor. 
In Britain, the quite barbaric Teutonic Angles, Saxons and Jutes 
had conquered the eastern half of England ; in the west of the 
island the Britons still held out, but were gradually being 
forced back into Wales and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons 
seem to have been among the most ruthless and eifective of bar- 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 527 

barian conquerors, for, wherever they prevailed, their lan- 
guage completely replaced the Keltic or Latin speech — it is 
not certain which — used by the British. These Anglo-Saxons 
were as yet not Christianized. Most of Gaul, Holland, and 
the Rhineland was under the fairly vigorous, Christianized, 
and much more civilized kingdom of the Franks. But the 
Rhone valley was under the separate kingdom of the Bur- 
gundians. Spain and some of the south of France were under 
the rule of the Visigoths, but the Suevi were in possession of 
the north-west corner of the peninsula. Of the Vandal king- 
dom in Africa we have already written; and Italy, still in its 
population and habits Roman, came under the rule of the Os- 
trogoths. There was no emperor left in Rome ; Theodoric I 
ruled there as the first of a line of Gothic kings, and his rule 
extended across the Alps into Pannonia and down the Adriatic 
to Dalmatia and Serbia. To the east of the Gothic kingdom 
the emperors of Constantinople ruled definitely. The Bulgars 
were still at this time a Mongolian tribe of horse-riding nomads 
in the region of the Volga ; the Aryan Serbs had recently come 
southward to the shores of the Black Sea into the original hom.e 
of the Visigoths ; the Turko-Finnish Magyars w^ere not yet 
in Europe. The Lombards were as yet north of the Danube. 

The sixth century was marked by a phase of vigour on the 
part of the Eastern Empire under the Emperor Justinian 
(527-565). The Vandal kingdom was recovered in 534; the 
Goths w^re expelled from Italy in 553. So soon as Justinian 
w^as dead (565), the Lombards descended into Italy and set- 
tled in Lombardy, but they left Ravenna, Rome, Southern 
Italy, and Xorth Africa under the rule of the Eastern 
Empire. 

Such was the political condition of the world in which the 
idea of Christendom developed. The daily life of that time 
was going on at a very low level indeed physically, intellectu- 
ally, and morally. It is frequently said that Europe in the 
sixth and seventh centuries relapsed into barbarism, but that 
does not express the reality of the case. It is far more cor- 
rect to say that the civilization of the Roman empire had 
passed into a phase of extreme demoralization. Barbarism is 
a social order of an elementary type, orderly within its limits; 
but the state of Europe beneath its political fragmentation was 
a social disorder. Its morale was not that of a kraal, but that 



528 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of a slum. In a savage kraal a savage knows that he belongs 
to a community, and lives and acts accordingly; in a slum, 
the individual neither knows of nor acts in relation to any 
greater being. 

Only very slowly and weakly did Christianity restore that 
lost sense of community and teach men to rally about the idea 
of Christendom. The social and economic structure of the 
Roman Empire was in ruins. That civilization had been a 
civilization of wealth and political power sustained by the 
limitation and slavery of the gTeat mass of mankind. It had 
presented a spectacle of outward splendour and luxurious re- 
hnement, but beneath that brave outward show were cruelty, 
stupidity, and stagnation. It had to break down, it had to be 
removed before anything better could replace it. 

We have already called attention to its intellectuaj deadness. 
For three centuries it had produced neither science nor litera- 
ture of any importance. It is only where men are to be found 
neither too rich and powerful to be tempted into extravagant 
indulgences nor too poor and limited to care for anything be- 
yond the daily need that those disinterested curiosities and 
serene impulses can have play that give sane philosophy and 
science and great art to the world, and the plutocracy of Rome 
had made such a class impossible. When men and women are 
unlimited and unrestrained, the evidence of history shows 
clearly that they are all liable to become monsters of self- 
indulgence; when, on the other hand, they are driven and 
unhappy, then their impulse is towards immoderate tragical 
resorts, towards wild revolts or towards the austerities and 
intensities of religion. 

It is not perhaps true to say that the world became miserable 
in these "dark ages" to which we have now come ; much nearer 
the truth is it to say that the violent and vulgar fraud of 
Roman imperialism, that world of politicians, adventurers, 
landowners and financiers, collapsed into a sea of misery that 
was already there. Our histories of these times are very 
imperfect : there were few places where men could write, and 
little encouragement to write at all ; no one was sure even 
of the safety of his manuscript or the possibility of its being 
read. But we know enough to tell that this age w-as an age 
not merely of war and robbery, but of famine and pestilence. 
No effective sanitary organization had yet come into the world, 



i 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 



529 



and the migrations of the time must have destroyed whatever 
hygenic balance had been established. Attila's ravages in 
North Italy were checked by an outbreak of fever in 452. There 
was a great epidemic of bubonic plague towards the end of 
the reign of Justinian (5G5) which did much to weaken the 
defence of Italy against the Lombards. In 543 ten thousand 



•^ 'A -*% ^Wipof^lXROP£ahotit500AJ). ifi A A 




'^^-'^'^^^^m^ 



people had died in one day in Constantinople. (Gibbon says 
"each day.") Plague was raging in Rome in 590. The 
seventh century was also a plague-stricken century. The Eng- 
lishman Bede, one of the few writers of the time, records pesti- 
lences in England in 664, 672, 678, and 683, no fewer than 
four in twenty years ! Gibbon couples the Justinian epidemic 
with the great comet of 531, and with the very frequent and 
serious earthquakes- of that reign. "Many cities of the east 
were left vacant, and in several districts of Italy the harvest 
and the vintage withered on the gTound." He alleges "a 



530 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

visible decrease of the human species which has never been 
made good in some of the fairest countries of the globe." To 
many in those dark days it seemed that all learning and all that 
made life seemly and desirable was perishing. 

How far the common lot was unhappier under these condi- 
tions of squalor and insecurity than it had been under the grind- 
ing order of the imperial system it is impossible to say. There 
was possibly much local variation, the rule of violent bullies 
here and a good-tempered freedom there, famine this year and 
plenty the next. If robbers abounded, tax-gatherers and cred- 
itors had disappeared. Such kings as those of the Frankish 
and Gothic kingdoms were really phantom rulers to most of 
their so-called subjects; the life of each district went on at a 
low level, with little trade or travel. Greater or lesser areas 
of countryside would be dominated by some able person, claim- 
ing with more or less justice the title of lord or count or duke 
from the tradition of the later empire or from the king. Such 
local nobles would assemble bands of retainers and build them- 
selves strongholds. Often they adapted pre-existing buildings. 
The Colosseum at Eome, for example, the arena of many great 
gladiatorial shows, was converted into a fortress, and so was 
the amphitheatre at Aries. So also was the great tomb of 
Hadrian at Rome. In the decaying and now insanitary towns 
and cities shrunken bodies of artisans would hold together 
and serve the needs of the cultivating villages about them by 
their industry, placing themselves under the protection of 
some adjacent noble. 

§ 10 

A very important share in the social recrystallization that 
went on in the sixth and seventh centuries after the breakdown 
and fusion of the fourth and fifth was taken by the Christian 
monastic orders that were now arising in the Western world. 

Monasteries had existed in the world before Christianity. 
During the period of social unhappiness among the Jews be- 
fore the time of Jesus of Nazareth, there was a sect of Essenes 
who lived apart in communities vowed to austere lives of soli- 
tude, purity, and self-denial. Buddhism, too, had developed 
its communities of men who withdrew from the general effort 
and commerce of the world to lead lives of austerity and con- 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 531 

templation. Indeed, the story of Buddha as we have told it, 
shows that such ideas must have prevailed in India lonji; be- 
fore his time, and that at last he repudiated them. Quite 
early in the history of Christianity there arose a similar move- 
ment away from the competition and heat and stress of the 
daily life of men. In Egypt, particularly, great numbers of 
men and women went out into the desert and there lived soli- 
tary lives of prayer and contemplation, living in absolute pov- 
erty in caves or under rocks, and subsisting on the chance alms 
of those whom their holiness impressed. Such lives would 
signify little to the historian, they are indeed of their very 
nature lives withdrawn from history, were it not for the turn 
this monastic tendency presently took among the more ener- 
getic and practical Europeans. 

One of the central figures in the story of the development 
of monasticism in Europe is St. Benedict, who lived between 
480 and 544. He was born at Spoleto in Italy, and he was a 
young man of good family and ability. The shadow of the 
times fell upon him, and, like Buddha, he took to the religious 
life and at first set no limit to his austerities. Fifty miles 
from Rome is Subiaco, and there at the end of a gorge of the 
Anio, beneath a jungle growth of weeds and bushes, rose a 
deserted palace built by the Emperor Nero, overlooking an 
artificial lake that had been made in those days of departed 
prosperity by damming back the waters of the river. Here, 
with a hair shirt as his chief possession, Benedict took up his 
quarters in a cave in the high southward-looking cliff that over- 
hangs the stream, in so inaccessible a position that his food 
had to be lowered to him on a cord by a faithful admirer. 
Three years he lived here, and his fame spread as Buddha's did 
nearly a thousand years before under similar circumstances. 

As in the case of Buddha, the story of Benedict has been 
overlaid by foolish and credulous disciples with a mass of silly 
stories of miracles and manifestations. But presently we find 
him, no longer engaged in self-torment, but controlling a group 
of twelve monasteries, and the resort of a great number of peo- 
ple. Youths are brought to him to be educated, and the whole 
character of his life has changed. 

From Subiaco he moved further southward to Monte Cas- 
sino, half-way between Rome and Naples, a lonely and beauti- 
ful mountain, in the midst of a great circle of majestice heights. 



532 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Here, it is interesting to note that in the sixth century a.d. 
he found a temple of Apollo and a sacred grove and the coun- 
tryside still worshipping at this shrine. His first labours 
had to be missionary labours, and it was with difficulty that 
he persuaded the simple pagans to demolish their temple and 
cut down their grove. The establishment upon Monte Cas- 
sino became a famous and powerful centre within the lifetime 
of its founder. Mixed up with the imbecile inventions of 
marvel-loving monks about demons exorcised, disciples walking 
on the water, and dead children restored to life, we can still 
detect something of the real spirit of Benedict. Particularly 
significant are the stories that represent him as discouraging 
extreme mortification. He sent a damping message to a soli- 
tary who had invented a new degree in saintliness by chain- 
ing himself to a rock in a narrow cave. "Break thy chain," 
said Benedict, "for the true servant of God is chained not to 
rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ." 

And next to the discouragement of solitary self-torture it 
is Benedict's distinction that he insisted upon hard work. 
Through the legends shines the clear indication of the trouble 
made by his patrician students and disciples who found them- 
selves obliged to toil instead of leading lives of leisurely austerity 
under the ministrations of the lower class brethren. A third 
remarkable thing about Benedict was his political influence. He 
set himself to reconcile Goths and Italians, and it is clear that 
Totila, his Gothic king, came to him for counsel and was greatly 
influenced by him. When Totila retook Naples from the Greeks, 
the Gotbs protected the women from insult and treated even 
the captured soldiers with humanity. When Belisarius, Jus- 
tinian's general, had taken the same place ten years previously, 
he had celebrated his triumph by a general massacre. 

Now the monastic organization of Benedict was a very 
great beginning in the western world. One of his prominent 
followers was Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), the first 
monk to become pope (590) ; he was one of the most capable 
and energetic of the popes, sending successful missions to the 
unconverted, and particularly to the Anglo-Saxons. He ruled 
in Rome like an independent king, organizinc;' armies, mak- 
ing treaties. To his influence is due the imposition of the 
Benedictine rule upon nearly the whole of Latin monasticism. 

Closely associated with these two names in the development 



THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY 533 

of a civilizing monasticism out of the merely egotistic mortifica- 
tions of the early recluses is that of Cassiodorus (490-585). 
He was evidently much senior to Pope Gregory, and younger 
by ten years than Benedict, and, like these two, he belonged 
to a patrician family, a Syrian family settled in Italy. He 
had a considerable official career under the Gothic kings; and 
when, between 545 and 553, the overthrow of those kings 
and the great pestilence paved the way for the new barbaric rule 
of the Lombards, he took refuge in a monastic career. He 
founded a monastery upon his private estates, and set the 
monks he gathered to work in quite the Benedictine fashion, 
though whether his monks actually followed the Benedictine 
rule that was being formulated about the same time from Monte 
Cassino we do not know. But there can be no question of his 
influence upon the development of this great working, teach- 
ing, and studying order. It is evident that he was profoundly 
impressed by the universal decay of education and the possible 
loss of all learning and of the ancient literature by the world ; 
and from the first he directed his brethren to the task of 
preserving and restoring these things. He collected ancient 
MSS. and caused them to be copied. He made sundials, water 
clocks, and similar apparatus, a little last gleam of experi- 
mental science in the gathering darkness. He wrote a history 
of the Gothic kings, and, what is more significant of his sense 
of the needs of the time, he produced a series of school books 
on the liberal arts and a grammar. Probably his influence was 
even greater than that of St. Benedict in making monasticism 
into a powerful instrument for the restoration of social order 
in the Western world. 

The spread of monasteries of the Benedictine order or type 
in the seventh and eighth centuries was very considerable. 
Everywhere we find them as centres of light, restoring, main- 
taining, and raising the standard of cultivation, preserving 
some sort of elementary education, spreading useful arts, mul- 
tiplying and storing books, and keeping before the eyes of the 
world the spectacle and example of a social backbone. For 
eight centuries thenceforth the European monastic system re- 
mained a system of patches and fibres of enlightenment in 
what might otherwise have been a wholly chaotic world. Closely 
associated with the Benedictine monasteries were the schools 
that grew presently into the mediaeval universities. The schools 



bU THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of the Roman world had been altogether swept away in the 
general social breakdown. There was a time when very few 
priests in Britain or Gaul could read the gospel or their serv- 
ice books. Only gradually was teaching restored to the world. 
But when it was restored, it came back not as the duty work 
of a learned slave, but as the religious service of a special class 
of devoted men. 

In the east also there was a breach of educational continuity, 
but there the cause was not so much social disorder as religious 
intolerance, and the break was by no means so complete. Jus- 
tinian closed and dispersed the schools of Athens (529), but 
he did this very largely in order to destroy a rival to the new 
school he was setting up in Constantinople, which was more 
directly under imperial control. Since the new Latin learning 
of the developing western universities had no text-books and 
literature of its own, it had, in spite of its strong theological 
bias to the contrary', to depend very largely upon the Latin clas- 
sics and the Latin translations of the Greek literature. It 
was obliged to preserve far more of that splendid literature 
than it had a mind to do. 



XXX 

SEVEX CEXTUHIES IX ASIA (CIRCA 50 B.C. 
TO A.D. 650) 

§ 1. Justinian the Great. § 2. The Sassanid Empire in Per- 
sia. § 3. The Decay of Syria under the 8assanids. § 4. 
The First Message from Islam. § 5. Zoroaster and Mani. 
§ 6. Hunnish Peoples in Central Asia and India. § 7. 
The Great Age of China. § 8. Intellectual Fetters of China. 
§ 9. The Travels of Yuan Chivang. 

§ 1 

IN the preceding two chapters we have concentrated our 
attention chiefly on the collapse in the comparatively short 
space of four centuries of the political and social order 
of the western part of the great Roman Empire of Caesar 
and Trajan. We have dwelt npon the completeness of that 
collapse. To any intelligent and public-spirited mind living 
in the time and under the circumstances of St. Benedict or 
Cassiodorus, it must have seemed, indeed, as if the light of 
civilization was waning and near extinction. But with the 
longer views a study of universal history gives us, we can 
view those centuries of shadow as a phase, and probably a 
necessary phase, in the onward march of social and political 
ideas and understandings. And if, during that time, a dark 
sense of calamity rested upon Western Europe, we must re- 
member that over large portions of the world there was no 
retrogression. 

With their Western prepossessions European writers are 
much too prone to underrate the tenacity of the Eastern em- 
pire that centred upon Constantinople. This empire embodied 
a tradition much more ancient than that of Rome. If the 
reader will look at the map we have given of its extent in the 
sixth century, and if he will reflect that its official language 
had then become Greek, he will realize that what we are dealing 

535 



536 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

with here is only nominally a branch of the Roman Empire; 
it is really the Hellenic Empire of which Herodotus dreamt 
and which Alexander the Great founded. True it called itself 
Roman and its people "Romans," and to this day modern 
Greek is called "Romaic." True also that Constantine the 
Great knew no Greek and that Justinian's accent was bad. 
These superficialities of name and form cannot alter the fact 
that the empire was in reality Hellenic, with a past of six 
centuries at the time of Constantine the Great, and that while 
the real Roman Empire crumpled up completely in four cen- 
turies, this Hellenic "Roman Empire" held out for more than 
eleven — from 312, the beginning of the reig-n of Constantine 
the Great, to 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman 
Turks. 

And while w^e have had to tell of something like a complete 
social collapse in the west, there were no such equivalent break- 
downs in the east. Towns and cities flourished, the country- 
side was well cultivated, trade went on. For many centuries 
Constantinople was the greatest and richest city in the world. 
We will not trouble ourselves here with the names and follies, 
the crimes and intrigues, of its tale of emperors. As with 
most monarchs of great states, they did not gTiide their em- 
pire ; they were carried by it. We have already dealt at some 
length with Constantine the Great (312-337)., we have men- 
tioned Theodosius the Great (379-395), who for a little 
while reunited the empire, and Justinian I (527-565). Pres- 
ently we shall tell something of Heraclius (610-641). 
Justinian, like Constantine, may have had Slav blood in his 
veins. He was a man of great ambition and great organizing 
power, and he had the good fortune to be married to a woman 
of equal or greater ability, the Empress Theodora, who had 
in her youth been an actress of doubtful reputation. But his 
ambitious attempts to restore the ancient greatness of the em- 
pire probably overtaxed its resources. As we have told, he 
reconquered the African province from the Vandals and most 
of Italy from the Goths. He also recovered the South of 
Spain. He built the great and beautiful church of Sancta 
Sophia in Constantinople, founded a university, and codified 
the law.^ But against this we must set his closing of the schools 

' Great importance is attached to this task by historians, including one 
of the editors of this history. We are told that the essential contribution 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 537 

of Athens. Meanwhile a great plague swept the world, and 
at his death this renewed and expanded empire of his col- 
lapsed like a pricked bladder. The greater part of his Italian 
conquests was lost to the Lombards. Italy was indeed at that 
time almost a desert ; the Lombard historians assert they came 
into an empty country. The Avars and Slavs struck down from 
the Danube country towards the Adriatic, Slav populations es- 
tablishing themselves in what is now Serbia, Croatia, and Dal- 
matia, to become the Yugo-Slavs of to-day. Moreover, a great 
and exhausting struggle began with the Sassanid Empire in 
Persia. 

But before we say anything of this struggle, in which the 
Persians thrice came near to taking Constantinople, and which 
was decided by a great Persian defeat at Nineveh (627), it 
is necessary to sketch very briefly the history of Persia from 
the Parthian days. 



We have already drawn a comparison between the brief 
four centuries of Koman imperialism and the obstinate vitality 
of the imperialism of the Euphrates-Tigris country. We have 
glanced very transitorily at the Hellenized Bactrian and Seleu- 
cid monarchies that flourished in the eastern half of Alex- 
ander's area of conquest for three centuries, and told how the 
Parthians came down into Mesopotamia in the last century b.c. 
We have described the battle of Carrhse and the end of Cras- 
sus. Thereafter for two centuries and a half the Parthian 
dynasty of the Arsacids ruled in the east • and the Eoman 
in the west, with Armenia and Syria between them, and the 
boundaries shifted east and west as either side grew stronger. 

of Rome to the inheritance of mankind is the idea of society founded 
on law, and that this exploit of Justinian was the crown of the gift. 
The writer is ill-equipped to estimate the peculiar value of Roman legalism 
to mankind. Existing law seems to him to be based upon a confused 
foundation of conventions, arbitrary assumptions, and working fictions 
about human relationship, and to be a very impracticable and antiquated 
system indeed; he is persuaded that a time will come when the whole 
theory and practice of law will be recast in the light of a well-developed 
science of social psychology in accordance with a scientific conception of 
human society as one developing organization and in definite relationship 
to a system of moral and intellectual education. lie .contemplates the 
law and lawyers of to-day with a temperamental lack of appreciation. 
This may have made him negligent of Justinian and unjust to Rome as a 
whole. 



538 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

We have marked the utmost eastward extension of the Roman 
Empire under Trajan (see map to Chap. XXVIII, § 3), and 
we have noted that about the same time the Indo-Scythians 
(Chap. XXVIII, § 4) poured down into India. 

In 227 occurred a revohition, and the Arsacid dynasty gave 
way to a more vigorous line, the Sassanid, a national Persian 
line under Ardashir I. In one respect the empire of Ardashir 
I presented a curious parallelism with that of Constantino 
the Great a hundred years later. Ardashir attempted to con- 
solidate it hy insisting upon religious unity, and adopted as 
the state religion the old Persian faith of Zoroaster, of which 
we shall have more to say later. 

This new Sassanid Empire immediately became aggressive, 
and under Sapor I, the son and successor of Ardashir, took 
Antioch. We have already noted how the Emperor Valerian 
was defeated (260) and taken prisoner. But as Sapor was 
retiring from a victorious march into Asia Minor, he was 
fallen upon and defeated by Odenathus, the Arab king of a great 
desert-trading centre, Palmyra. 

For a brief time under Odenathus, and then under his widow 
Zenobia, Palmyra was a considerable state, wedged between the 
two empires. Then it fell to the Emperor Aurelian, who car- 
ried off Zenobia in chains to grace his triumph at Pome (272). 

We wull not attempt to trace the fluctuating fortunes of the 
Sassanids during the next three centuries. Throughout that 
time war between Persia and the empire of Constantinople 
wasted Asia Minor like a fever. Christianity spread widely 
and wag persecuted, for after the Christianization of Pome 
the Persian monarch remained the only god-monarch on earth, 
and he saw in Christianity merely the propaganda of his 
Byzantine rival. Constantinople became the protector of the 
Christians and Persia of the Zoroastrians ; in a treaty of 422, 
the one empire agreed to tolerate Zoroastrianism and the other 
Christianity. In 483, the Christians of the east split off from 
the Orthodox church and became the Xestorian church ; which, 
as we have already noted, spread its missionaries far and 
wide throughout Central and Eastern Asia. This separa- 
tion from Europe, since it freed the Christian bishops of 
the east from the rule of the Byzantine patriarchs, and 
so lifted from the Xestorian church the suspicion of po- 
litical disloyalty, led to a complete toleration of Chris- 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 539 

tianity in Persia. With Chosroes I (531-579) came a last 
period of Sassanid vigour. He was the contemporary and 
parallel of Justinian. He reformed taxation, restored the 
orthodox Zoroastrianism, extended his power into Southern 
Arabia (Yemen), which he rescued from the rule of Abys- 
sinian Christians, pushed his northern frontier into Western 
Turkestan, and carried on a series of wars with Justinian. 
His reputation as an enlightened ruler stood so high, that when 
Justinian closed the schools of Athens, the last Greek philoso- 
phers betook themselves to his court. They sought in him the 
philosopher king — that mirage which, as we have noted, Con- 
fucius and Plato had sought in their day. The philosophers 
found the atmosphere of orthodox Zoroastrianism even less to 
their taste than orthodox Christianity, and in 549 Chosroes 
had the kindness to insert a clause in an armistice with Jus- 
tinian, permitting their return to Greece, and ensuring that 
they should not be molested for their pagan philosophy or their 
transitory pro-Persian behaviour. 

It is in connection with Chosroes that we hear now of a new 
Hunnish people in Central Asia, the Turks, who are, we learn, 
first in alliance with him and then with Constantinople. 

Chosroes II (590-628), the grandson of Chosroes I, experi- 
enced extraordinary fluctuations of fortune. At the outset of 
his career he achieved astonishing successes against the empire 
of Constantinople. Three times (in 608, 615, and 627) his 
armies reached Chalcedon, which is over against Constantino- 
ple ; he took Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem (614), and from 
Jerusalem he carried off a cross, said to be the true cross on 
which Jesus was crucified, to his capital Ctesiphon. (But some 
of this or some other true cross had already got to Rome. It 
had been brought from Jerusalem, it was said, by the ''Empress 
Helena," the idealized and canonized mother of Constantine, 
a story for which Gibbon displayed small respect.^) In 619, 
Chosroes II conquered that facile country, Egypt. This career 
of conquest was at last arrested by the Emperor Heraclius 
(610), who set about restoring the ruined military power of 
Constantinople. For some time Heraclius avoided a great bat- 
tle while he gathered his forces. He took the field in good 
earnest in 623. The Persians experienced a series of de- 
feats culminating in the battle of Nineveh (627) ; but neither 
^ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxiii. 



540 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

side had the strength for the complete defeat of the other. 
At the end of the struggle there was still an undefeated Persian 
army upon the Bosphorus, although there were victorious By- 
zantine forces in Mesopotamia. In 628 Chosroes II was de- 
posed and murdered hy his son. An indecisive peace was con- 
cluded between the two exhausted empires a year or so later, 
restoring their old boundaries ; and the true cross was sent back 
to Heraclius, who replaced it in Jerusalem with much pomp 
and ceremony. 

§ 3 

So we give briefly the leading events in the history of the 
Persian as of the Byzantine Empire. What is more interesting 
for us and less easy to give are the changes that went on in the 
lives of the general population of those great empires during 
that time. The present writer can find little of a definite char- 
acter about the great pestilences that we know swept the world 
in the second and sixth centuries of this era. Certainly they 
depleted population, and probably they disorganized social 
order in these regions just as much as we know they did in the 
Roman and Chinese empires. 

The late Sir Mark Sykes, whose untimely death in Paris 
during the influenza epidemic of 1919 was an irreparable loss 
to Great Britain, wrote in The Caliph's Last Heritage a vivid 
review of the general life of Nearer Asia during the period we 
are considering. In the opening centuries of the present era, 
he says : ^'The direction cf military administration and imperial 
finance became entirely divorced in men's minds from practical 
government ; and notwithstanding the vilest tyranny of sots, 
drunkards, tyrants, lunatics, savages, and abandoned women, 
who from time to time held the reins of government, .Mesopo- 
tamia, Babylonia, and Syria contained enormous populations, 
huge canals and dykes were kept in repair, and commerce and 
architecture flourished, in spite of a perpetual procession of hos- 
tile armies and a continual changing of the nationality of the 
governor. Each peasant's interest was centred in his ruling- 
town ; each citizen's interest was in the progress and prosperity 
of his city ; and the advent of an enemy's army may have some- 
times been looked on even with satisfaction, if his victory was 
assured and the payment of his contracts a matter of certainty. 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 



541 



"A raid from the north/ on the other hand, must have been 
a matter for dread. Then the villagers had need to take 
refuge behind the walls of the cities, from whence they could 
descry the smoke which told of the wreck and damage caused 
by the nomads. So long, however, as the canals were not 
destroyed (and, indeed, they were built with such solidity and 




caution that their safety was assured), no irreparable damage 
could be effected. . . . 

"In Armenia and Pontus the condition of life was quite 
otherwise. These were mountain districts, containing fierce 
tribes headed by powerful native nobility under recognized 
ruling kings, while in the valleys and plains the peaceful cul- 
tivator provided the necessary economic resources. . . . Cilicia 
and Cappadocia were now thoroughly subject to Greek i,nflu- 
ence, and contained numerous wealthy and highly civilized 
towns, besides possessing a considerable merchant marine. 
Passing from Cilicia to the Hellespont, the whole Mediter- 
ranean coast was crowded with wealthy cities and Greek col- 
* Turanians from Turk?stan or Avars from the Caucasus. 



542 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

onies, entirely cosmopolitan in tliouglit and speech, with those 
municipal and local ambitions which seem natural to the Gre- 
cian character. The Grecian Zone extended from Caria to 
the Bosphorus, and followed the coast as far as Sinope on the 
Black Sea, where it gradually faded away. 

"Syria was broken up into a curious quilt-like pattern of 
principalities and municipal kingdoms; beginning with the al- 
most barbarous states of Commagene and Edessa (Urfa) in 
the north. South of these stood Bambyce, with its huge tem- 
ples and priestly governors. Towards the coast a dense popu- 
lation in villages and towns clustered around the independent 
cities of Antioch, Apamea, and Emesa (Homs) ; while out in 
the wilderness the great Semitic merchant city of Palmyra was 
gaining wealth and greatness as the neutral trading-ground be- 
tween Parthia and Rome. Between the Lebanon and Anti- 
Lebanon we find, at the height of its glory, Heliopolis (Baal- 
bek), the battered fragments of which even now command our 
admiration. . . . Bending in towards Galilee we find the won- 
drous cities of Gerasa and Philadelphia (Amman) connected 
by solid roads of masonry and furnished with gigantic aque^ 
ducts. . . . Syria is still so rich in ruins and remains of the 
period that it is not difficult to picture to oneself the nature 
of its civilization. The arts of Greece, imported long before, 
had been developed into magnificence that bordered on vulgar- 
ity. The richness of ornamentation, the lavish expense, the 
flaunting wealth, all tell that the tastes of the voluptuous and 
artistic Semites were then as now. I have stood in the colon- 
nades of Palmyra and I have dined in the Hotel Cecil, and, 
save that the latter is built of iron, daubed with sham wood, 
sham stucco, sham gold, sham velvet, and sham stone, the effect 
is identical. In Syria there were slaves in sufficient quantity 
to make real buildings, but the artistic spirit is as debased as 
anything made by machinery. Over against the cities the vil- 
lage folk must have dwelt pretty much as they do now, in 
houses of mud and dry stone wall ; while out in the distant pas- 
tures the Bedouin tended their flocks in freedom under the 
rule of the Nabatean kings of their own race, or performed 
the office of guardians and agents of the great trading caravans. 

"Beyond the herdsmen lay the parching deserts, which acted 
as the impenetrable barrier and defence of the Parthian Em- 
pire behind the Euphrates, where stood the great cities of 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 



543 



Ctesiphon, Seleucia, Hatra, Nisibin, Harran, and hundreds 
more whose very names are forgotten. These great townships 
subsisted on the enormous cereal wealth of Mesopotamia, 
watered as it then was by canals, whose makers' names were 
even then already lost in the mists of antiquity. Babylon and 
Nineveh had passed away; the successors of Persia and Mace- 
don had given place to Parthia; but the people and the culti- 




vation were the same as when Cyrus the Conqueror had first 
subdued the land. The language of many of the towns was 
Greek, and the cultured citizens of Seleucia might criticize the 
philosophies and tragedies of Athens ; but the millions of the 
agricultural population knew possibly no more of these things 
than does many an Essex peasant of to-day know of what 
passes in the metropolis." 

Compare with this the state of affairs at the end of the 
seventh century. 

"Syria was now an impoverished and stricken land, and her 



544 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

great cities, though still populated, must have been encum- 
bered with ruins which the public funds were not sufficient to 
remove. Damascus and Jerusalem themselves had not recov- 
ered from the effects of long and terrible sieges; Amman and 
Gerash had declined into wretched villages under the sway 
and lordship of the Bedouin. The Hauran, perhaps, still 
showed signs of the prosperity for which it had been noted in 
the days of Trajan ; but the wretched buildings and rude in- 
scriptions of this date all point to a sad and depressing decline. 
Out in the desert, Palmyra stood empty and desolate save for a 
garrison in the castle. On the coasts and in the Lebanon a 
shadow of the former business and wealth was still to be seen ; 
but in the north, ruin, desolation, and abandonment must have 
been the common state of the country, which had been raided 
with unfailing regularity for one hundred years and had been 
held by an enemy for fifteen. Agriculture must have declined, 
and the population notably decreased through the plagues and 
distresses from which it had suffered. 

"Cappadocia had insensibly sunk into barbarism ; and the 
great basilicas and cities, which the rude countrymen could 
neither repair nor restore, had been leveled with the ground. 
The Anatolian peninsula had been ploughed and harrowed by 
the Persian armies ; the great cities had been plundered and 
sacked." 



It was while Heraclius was engaged in restoring order in 
this already desolated Syria after the death of Chosroes II 
and before the final peace with Persia, that a strange message 
was brought to him. The bearer had ridden over to the im- 
perial outpost at Bostra in the wilderness south of Damascus. 
The letter was in Arabic, the obscure Semitic language of the 
nomadic peoples of the southern desert ; and probably only 
an interpretation reached him — presumably with deprecatory 
notes by the interpreter. 

It was an odd, florid challenge from someone who called 
himself "Muhammad, the Prophet of God." This Muhammad, 
it appeared, called upon Heraclius to acknowledge the one true 
God and to serve him. Nothing else was definite in the 
document. 

There is no record of the reception of this missive, and 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 545 

presumably it went unanswered. The emperor probably 
shrugged his shoulders, and was faintly amused at the incident. 

But at Ctesiphon they knew more about this Muhammad. 
He was said to be a tiresome false prophet, who had incited 
Yemen, the rich province of Southern Arabia, to rebel against 
the King of Kings. Kavadh was much occupied with affairs. 
He had deposed and murdered his father Chosroes II, and he 
was attempting to reorganize the Persian military forces. To 
him also came a message identical with that sent to Heraclius. 
The thing angered them. He tore up the letter, flung the 
fragments at the envoy, and bade him begone. 

When this was told to the sender far away in the squalid 
little town of Medina, he was very angi-y. "Even so, O Lord !" 
he cried; ''rend Thou his kingdom from him." (a.d. 628.) 

§ 5 

But before we go on to tell of the rise of Islam in the world, 
it will be well to complete our survey of the condition of Asia 
in the dawn of the seventh century. And a word or so is due 
to religious developments in the Persian community during 
the Sassanid period. 

From the days of Cyrus onward Zoroastrianism had pre- 
vailed over the ancient gods of Nineveh and Babylon. Zoroas- 
ter (the Greek spelling of the Iranian "Zarathustra"), like 
Buddha, was an Aryan. We know nothing of the age in which 
he lived; some authorities make him as early as 1000 b.c, 
others make him contemporary with Buddha or Confucius ; 
and as little do we know of his place of birth or his exact 
nationality. His teachings are preserved to us in the Zend 
Avesta, but here, since they no longer play any great part in 
the world's affairs, we cannot deal with them in any detail. 
The opposition of a good god, Ormuzd, the god of light, truth, 
frankness, and the sun, and a bad god, Ahriman, god of secrecy, 
cunning, diplomacy, darkness, and night, formed a very cen- 
tral part of his religion. As we find it in history, it is already 
surrounded by a ceremonial and sacerdotal system ; it has no 
images, but it has priests, temples, and altars, on which bum a 
sacred fire and at which sacrificial ceremonies are performed. 
Among other distinctive features is its prohibition of either 
the burning or the burial of the dead. The Parsees of India, 



546 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the last surviving Zoroastrians, still lay their dead out within 
certain open towers, the Towers of Silence, to which the vul- 
tures come. 

Under the Sassanid kings from Ardashir onward (227), 
this religion was the official religion; its head was the second 
person in the state next to the king, and the king in quite the 
ancient fashion was supposed to be divine or semi-divine and 
upon terms of peculiar intimacy with Ormuzd. 

But the religious fermentation of the world did not leave 
the supremacy of Zoroastrianism undisputed in the Persian 
Empire. E"ot only was there a great eastward diffusion of 
Christianity, to which we have already given notice, but new 
sects arose in Persia, incorporating the novel ideas of the time. 
One early variant or branch of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, we 
have already named. It had spread into Europe by the first 
century b.c, after the eastern campaigns of Pompey the Great. 
It became enormously popular with the soldiers and common 
people, and, until the time of Constantino the Great, continued 
to be a serious rival to Christianity. Indeed, one of his suc- 
cessors, the Emperor Julian (361-363), known in Christian 
history as '^Julian the Apostate," made a belated attempt to 
substitute it for the accepted faith. Mithras was a god of 
light, '^proceeding" from Ormuzd and miraculously born, in 
much the same way that the third person in the Christian 
Trinity proceeds from the first. Of this branch of the Zoroas- 
trian stem we need say no more. In the third century a.d., 
however, another religion, Manichfeism, arose, which deserves 
some notice now. 

Mani, the founder of Manichteism, was born the son of a 
good family of Ecbatana, the old Median capital (a.d. 216). 
He was educated at Ctesiphon. His father was some sort of 
religious sectary, and he was brought up in an atmosphere of 
religious discussion. There came to him that persuasion that 
he at last had the complete light, which is the moving power 
of all religious initiators. He was impelled to proclaim his 
doctrine. In a.d. 242, at the accession of Sapor I, the second 
Sassanid monarch, he began his teaching. 

It is characteristic of the way in which men's minds were 
moving in those days that his teaching included a sort of 
theocrasia. He was not, he declared, proclaiming anvthinrj 
new. The great religious founders before him had all been 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 547 

right: Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus Christ — all had been 
true prophets, but to him it was appointed to clarify and 
cro^vn their imperfect and confused teaching. This he did in 
Zoroastrian language. He explains the perplexities and con- 
tradictions of life as a conflict of light and darkness, Ormuzd 
was God and Ahriman Satan. But how man was created, how 
he fell from light into darkness, how he is being disentangled 
and redeemed from the darkness, and of the part played by 
Jesus in this strange mixture of religions we cannot explain 
here even if we would. Our interest with the system is his- 
torical and not theological. 

But of the utmost historical interest is the fact that Mani 
not only went about Iran preaching these new and to him these 
finally satisfying ideas of his, but into Turkestan, into India, 
and over the passes into China. This freedom of travel is to 
be noted. It is interesting also because it brings before us 
the fact that Turkestan was no longer a country of dangerous 
nomads, but a country in which cities were flourishing and men 
had the education and leisure for theological argimient. The 
ideas of Mani spread eastward and westward with great 
rapidity, and they were a most fruitful rootstock of heresies 
throughout the entire Christian world for nearly a thousand 
years. 

Somewhen about a.d. 270 Mani came back to Ctesiphon and 
made many converts. This brought him into conflict with the 
official religion and the priesthood. In 277 the reigning mon- 
arch had him crucified and his body, for some unknown reason, 
flayed, and there began* a fierce persecution of his adherents. 
Nevertheless, Manichaeism held its own in Persia with Nes- 
torian Christianity and orthodox Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism) 
for some centuries. 

§ 6 

It becomes fairly evident that in the fifth and sixth centuries 
A.D. not merely Persia, but the regions that are now Turkestan 
and Afghanistan were far more advanced in civilization than 
were the French and English of that time. The obscurity of 
the history of these regions has been lifted in the last two 
decades, and a very considerable literature written in lan- 
guages of the Turkish group has been discovered. These ex- 



548 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tant manuscripts date from the seventh century onward. The 
alphabet is an adaptation of the Syrian, introduced by 
Manichsean missionaries, and many of the MSS. discovered — 
parchments have been found in windows in the place of glass 
— are as beautifully written as any Benedictine production. 
Mixed up with a very extensive Manichaean literature are 
translations of the Christian scriptures and Buddhistic wait- 
ings. Much of this early Turkish material still awaits 
examination. 

Everything points to the conclusion that those centuries, 
which were centuries of disaster and retrogression in Europe, 
were comparatively an age of progress in Middle Asia east- 
ward into China. 

A steady westward drift to the north of the Caspian of 
Hunnish peoples, who were now called Tartars and Turks, was 
still going on iii the sixth century, but it must be thought of 
as an overflow rather than as a migration of whole peoples. 
The world from the Danube to the Chinese frontiers was still 
largely a nomadic world, with towns and cities growing up 
upon the chief trade routes. We need not tell in any detail 
here of the constant clash of the Turkish peoples of Western 
Turkestan with the Persians to the south of them, the age- 
long bickering of Turanian and Iranian. We hear nothing 
of any great northward marches of the Persians, but there 
were great and memorable raids to the south both by the 
Turanians to the east and the Alans to the west of the Caspian 
before the big series of movements' of the third and fourth cen- 
tury westward that carried the Alans and Huns into the heart 
of Europe. There was a nomadic drift to the east of Persia 
and southward through Afghanistan towards India, as well as 
this drift to the north-west. These streams of nomads flowed 
by Persia on either side. We have already mentioned the 
Yue-Chi (Chap, xxviii, § 4), who finally descended into India 
as the Indo-Scythians in the second century, A backward, 
still nomadic section of these Yue-Chi remained in Central 
Asia, and became numerous upon the steppes of Turkestan, as 
the Ephthalites or White Huns. After being a nuisance and 
a danger to the Persians for three centuries, they finally began 
raiding into India in the footsteps of their kinsmen about the 
year 470, about a quarter of a century after the death of Attila. 
They did not migrate into India; they went to and fro, looting 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 



549 



in India and returning with their loot to their own country, 
just as later the Huns established themselves in the great plain 
of the Danube and raided all Europe. 

The history of India during these seven centuries we are 
now reviewing is punctuated by these two invasions of the Yue- 
Chi, the Indo-Scythians who, as we have said, wiped out the 
last traces of Hellenic nile, and the Ephthalites. Before the 
former of these, the Indo-Scythians, a wave of uprooted popu- 
lations, the Sakas, had been pushed; so that altogether India 
experienced three waves of barbaric invasion, about a.d. 100, 
about A.D. 120, and about a.d. 470. But only the second of 
these invasions was a permanent conquest and settlement. The 
Indo - Scythians 
made their head- 
quarters on the 
North-west Fron- 
tier and set up a 
dynasty, the 
Kushan dynasty, 
which ruled most 
of North India as 
far east as Benares. 

The chief among 
these Kushan mon- 
archs was Kanishka (date unknown), who added to North India 
Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. Like Asoka, he was a great 
and vigorous promoter of Buddhism, and these conquests, this 
great empire of the North-west Frontier, must have brought 
India into close and frequent relations with China and Tibet. 

We will not trouble to record here the divisions and coales- 
cences of power in India, nor the dynasties that followed the 
Kushans, because these things signify very little to us from 
our present point of view. Sometimes all India was a patch- 
work quilt of states; sometimes such empires as that of the 
Guptas prevailed over great areas. These things made little 
difference in the ideas, the religion, and the ordinary way of 
life of the Indian peoples. Brahminism held its own against 
Buddhism, and the two religions prospered side by side. The 
mass of the population was living then very much as it lives 
to-day; dressing, cultivating, and building its houses in much 
the same fashion. 




an Iphduilite Coin,. 



550 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The irruption of the Ephthalites is memorable not so much 
because of its permanent effects as because of the atrocities 
perpetrated by the invaders. These Ephthalites very closely 
resembled the Huns of Attila in their barbarism ; they merely 
raided, they produced no such dynasty as the Kushan mon- 
archy ; and their chiefs retained their headquarters in Western 
Turkestan. Mihiragiila, their most capable leader, has been 
called the Attila of India. One of his favourite amusements, 
we are told, was the expensive one of rolling elephants down 
precipitous places in order to watch their sufferings. His 
abominations roused his Indian tributary princes to revolt, and 
he was overthrown (528). But the final ending of the 
Ephthalite raids into India was effected not by Indians, but 
by the destruction of their central establishment of the Ephtha- 
lites on the Oxus (565) by the growing power of the Turks, 
working in alliance with the Persians. After this break-up, 
the Ephthalites dissolved very rapidly and completely into the 
surrounding populations, much as the European Iluns did after 
the death of Attila a hundred years earlier. Nomads without 
central grazing lands must disperse; nothing else is possible. 
Some of the chief Eajput clans of to-day in Rajputana in 
North India are descended, it is said, from these White Huns. 

§ 7 

These seven centuries which saw the beginning and the end 
of the emperors in Rome and the complete breakdown and 
recasting of the social, economic, political, and religious life 
of Western Europe, saw also very profound changes in the 
Chinese world. It is too commonly assumed by both Chinese, 
Japanese, and European historians, that the Han dyn-asty, 
under which we find China at the beginning of this period, and 
the Tang dynasty, with which it closed, were analogous as- 
cendancies controlling a practically similar empire, and that 
the four centuries of division that elapsed between the end of 
the Han dynasty (220) and the beginning of the Tang period 
(619) were centuries of disturbance rather than essential 
change. The divisions of China are supposed to be merely 
political and territorial; and, deceived by the fact that at the 
close as at the commencement of these four centuries, China 
occupied much the same wide extent of Asia, and was still 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 551 

recognizably China, still with a common culture, a common 
script, and a common body of ideas, they ignore the very funda- 
mental breaking down and reconstruction that went on, and 
the many parallelisms to the European experience that China 
displayed. 

It is true that the social collapse was never so complete in 
the Chinese as in the European world. There remained 
throughout the whole period considerable areas in. which the 
elaboration of the arts of life could go on. There was no such 
complete deterioration in cleanliness, decoration, artistic and 
literary production as we have to record in the West, and 
no such abandonment of any search for grace and pleasure. 
We note, for instance, that ''tea" appeared in the world, and 
its use spread throughout China. China began to drink tea 
in the sixth century a.d. And there w^ere Chinese poets to 
write delightfully about the effects of the first cup and the 
second cup and the third cup, and so on. China continued to 
produce beautiful paintings long after the fall of the Han rule. 
In the second, third, and fourth centuries some of the most 
lovely landscapes were painted that have ever been done by 
men. A considerable production of beautiful vases and carv- 
ings also continued. Fine building and decoration went on. 
Printing from wood blocks began about the same time as tea- 
drinking, and with the seventh century came a remarkable 
revival of poetry. 

Certain differences between the great empires of the East 
and West were all in favour of the stability of the former. 
China had no general coinage. The cash and credit system 
of the Western world, at once efficient and dangerous, had not 
strained her economic life. 'Not that the monetary idea was 
unknown. For small transactions the various provinces were 
using perforated zinc and brass "cash," but for larger there 
was nothing but stamped ingots of silver. This great empire 
was still carrying on most of its business on a basis of barter like 
that which prevailed in Babylon in the days of the Aramean 
merchants. And so it continued to do to the dawn of the 
twentieth century. 

We have seen how under the Roman republic economic and 
social order was destroyed by the too great fluidity of property 
that money brought about. Money became abstract, and lost 
touch with the real values it was supposed to represent. In- 



)52 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



dividuals and communities got preposterously into debt, and 
the world was saddled by a class of rich men who were creditors, 
men who did not handle and administer any real wealth, but 
who had the power to call up money. !No such development of 
"finance" occurred in China. Wealth in China remained real 
and visible. And China had no need for any Lieinian law, 
nor for a Tiberius Gracchus. The idea of property in China 
did not extend far beyond tangible things. There was no 




"labour" slavery, no gang servitude.^ The occupier and user 
of the land was in most instances practically the owner of it, 
subject to a land tax. There was a certain amount of small 
scale landlordism, but no great estates. Landless men worked 
for wages paid mostly in kind — as they were in ancient 
Babylon. 

These things made for stability and the geographical form 
of China for unity; nevertheless, the vigour of the Han 
dyna-sty declined, and when at last at the close of the second 
century a.d. the world catastrophe of the great pestilence struck 

* There were girl slaves who did domestic work and women who were 
bought and sold.— J. J. L. D. 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 553 

the system, the same pestilence that inaugurated a century of 
confusion in the Roman empire, the dynasty fell like a rotten 
tree before a gale. And the same tendency to break up into a 
number of warring states, and the same eruption of barbaric 
rulers, was displayed in East and West alike. In China, as 
in the Western empire, faith had decayed. Mr. Fu ascribes 
much of the political nervelessness of China in this period to 
Epicureanism, arising, he thinks, out of the sceptical indi- 
vidualism of Lao Tse. This phase of division is known as the 
"Three Kingdom Period." The fourth century saw a dynasty 
of more or less civilized Huns established as rulers in the prov- 
ince of Shen-si. This Hunnisli kingdom included not merely 
the north of China, but great areas of Siberia ; its dynasty 
absorbed the Chinese civilization, and its influence carried Chi- 
nese trade and knowledge to the Arctic circle. Mr. Fu com- 
pares this Siberian monarchy to the empire of Charlemagne 
in Europe; it was the barbarian becoming "Chinized" as 
Charlemagne was a barbarian becoming Romanized. Out of a 
fusion of these Siberian with native nortli Chinese elements 
arose the Suy dynasty, which conquered the south. This Suy 
dynasty marks the beginning of a renascence of China. Under 
a Suy monarch the Lu-chu isles were annexed to China, and 
there was a phase of great literary activity. The number of 
volumes at this time in the imperial library was increased, 
v/e are told, to 54,000. The dawn of the seventh century saw 
the beginning of the great Tang dynasty, which was to endure 
for three centuries. 

The renascence of China that began with Suy and culmi- 
nated in Tang was, Mr, Fu insists, a real new birth. "The 
spirit," he writes, "was a new one ; it marked the Tang civiliza- 
tion with entirely distinctive features. Four main factors had 
been brought together and fused: (1) Chinese liberal culture; 
(2) Chinese classicism; (3) Indian Buddhism; and (4) 
Northern bravery, A new C^nna had come into being. The 
provincial system, the central administration, and the military 
organization of the Tang dynasty were quite difl"erent from 
those of their predecessors. The arts had been much influenced 
and revivified by Indian and Central Asiatic influences. The 
literature was no mere continuation of the old ; it was a new pro- 
duction. The reliffious and philosophical schools of Buddhism 
were fresh features. It was a period of substantial change. 



554 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

"It may be interesting to compare this making of China with 
the fate of the Roman Empire in her later days. As the 
Eoman world was divided into the eastern and western halves, 
so was the Chinese world into the southern and the northern. 
The barbarians in the case of Rome and in the case of China 
made similar invasions. They established dominions of a 
similar sort. Charlemagne's empire corresponded to that of 
the Siberian dynasty (Later Wei), the temporary recovery of 
the Western empire by Justinian corresponded to the tem- 
porary recovery of the north by Liu Yu. The Byzantine line 
corresponded to the southern dynasties. But from this point 
the two worlds diverged. China recovered her unity; Europe 
has still to do so." 

The dominions of the emperor, Tai-tsung (627), the second 
Tang monarch, extended southward into Annam and westward 
to the Caspian sea. His southern frontier in that direction 
marched with that of Persia. His northern ran along the 
Altai from the Kirghis sLeppe, north of the desert of Gobi. 
But it did not include Corea, which was conquered and made 
tributary by his son. This Tang dynasty civilized and in- 
corporated into the Chinese race the whole of the southward 
population, and just as the Chinese of the north call them- 
selves the "men of Han," so the Chinese of the south call them- 
selves the "men of Tang." The law was codified, the literary 
examination system was revised, and a complete and accurate 
edition of all the Chinese classics was produced. To the court 
of Tai-tsung came an embassy from Byzantium, and, what is 
more significant, from Persia came a company of Nestorian 
missionaries (635). These latter Tai-tsung received with 
great respect; he heard them state the chief articles of their 
creed, and ordered the Christian scriptures to be translated 
into Chinese for his further examination. In 638 he an- 
nounced that he found the new religion entirely satisfactory, 
and that it might be preached within the empire. He also 
allowed the building of a church and the foundation of a 
monastery. 

A still more remarkable embassy also came to the court of 
Tai-tsung in the year 628, five years earlier than the Nes- 
torians. This was a party of Arabs, who came by sea to Can- 
ton in a trading vessel from Yanbu, the port, of Medina in 
Arabia. (Incidentally it is interesting to know that there 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 555 

were such vessels engaged in an east and west trade at this 
time.) These Arabs had been sent by that Muhammad we 
have already mentioned, who styled himself '^The Prophet of 
God," and the message they brought to Tai-tsung was probably 
identical with the summons which was sent in the same year 
to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and to Kavadh in Ctesi- 
phon. But the Chinese monarch neither neglected the message 
as Heraclius did, nor insulted the envoys after the fashion of 
the parricide Kavadh. He received them well, expressed great 
interest in their theological views, and assisted them, it is said, 
to build a mosque for the Arab traders in Canton — a mosque 
which survives to this day. It is one of the oldest mosques 
in the world. 

§ 8 

The urbanity, the culture, and the power of China under 
the early Tang rulers are in so vivid a contrast with the decay, 
disorder, and divisions of the Western world, as at once to 
raise some of the most interesting questions in the history of 
civilization. Why did not China keep this great lead she had 
won by her rapid return to unity and order ? Why does she 
not to this day dominate the world culturally and politically? 

For a long time she certainly did keep ahead. It is only a 
thousand years later, in- the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
with the discovery of America, the spread of printed books and 
education in the West, and the dawn of modern scientific dis- 
covery, that we can say with confidence that the Western world 
began to pull ahead of China. Under the Tang rule, her 
greatest period, and then again under the artistic but rather 
decadent Sung dynasty (960-1279), and again during the 
period of the cultured Mings (1358-1644), China presented a 
spectacle of prosperity, happiness, and artistic activity far in 
front of any contemporary state. And seeing that she achieved 
so much, why did she not achieve more? Chinese shipping was 
upon the seas, and there was a considerable overseas trade 
during that time.^ Why did the Chinese never discover Amer- 

* It is doubtful if the Chinese knew of the mariner's compass. Hirth, 
Ancient History of China, p. 126 sqq., comes to the conclusion, after a 
careful examination of all data, that, although it is probable something 
like the compass was known in high antiquity, the knowledge of it was 
lost for a long time afterwards, until, in the Middle Ages, it reappears 
as an instrument in the hands of geomancers (people who selected favour- 



556 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ica or Australia? There was much isolated observation, in 
genuity, and invention. The Chinese knew of gunpowder in 
the sixth century, they used coal and gas heating centuries 
before these things were used in Europe ; their bridge-building, 
their hydraulic engineering was admirable; the knowledge of 
materials shown in their enamel and lacquer ware is very great. 
Why did they never organize the system of record and co-opera- 
tion in inquiry that has given the world modern science ? And 
why, in spite of their general training in good manners and self- 
restraint, did intellectual education never soak down into the 
general mass of the population ? Why are the masses of China 
to-day, and why have they always been, in spite of an excep- 
tionally high level of natural intelligence, illiterate? 

It is customary to meet such questions with rather platitudi- 
nous answers. We are told that the Chinaman is the most 
conservative of human beings, that, in contrast with the Euro- 
pean races, his mind is twisted round towards the past, that he 
is the willing slave of etiquette and precedent to a degree in 
conceivable to Western minds. He is represented as having a 
mentality so distinct that one might almost expect to find a 
difference in brain structure to explain it. The appeals of 
Confucius to the wisdom of the ancients are always quoted to 
clinch this suggestion. 

If, however, we examine this generalization more closely, it 
dissolves into thin air. The superior intellectual initiative, the 
liberal enterprise, the experimental disposition that is supposed 
to characterize the Western mind, is manifest in the history of 
that mind only during certain phases and under exceptional 
circumstances. For the rest, the Western world displays itsel I' 
as traditional and conservative as China. And, on the other 
hand, the Chinese mind has, under conditions of stimulus, 
shown itself quite as inventive and versatile as the European, 
and the very kindred Japanese mind even more so. For, take the 
case of the Greeks, the whole swing of their mental vigour falls 
into the period between the sixth century b.c. and the decay 

able sites for graves, etc.). The earliest unmistakable mention of its 
use as a guide to mariners occurs in a work of the 12th century and 
refers to its use on foreign ships trading between China and Sumatra. 
Hirth is rather inclined to assume that Arab travellers may have seen 
it in the hands of Chinese geomancors and applied its use to navigation, 
so that it was afterwards brought back by them to China as the "mariner's 
compass." — J. J. L. D. 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 557 

of the Alexandrian Mnsenm under the later Ptolemies in the 
second century b.c. There were Greeks before that time and 
Greeks since, but a history of a thousand years of the Byzantine 
Empire showed the Hellenic world at least as intellectually 
stagnant as China. Then we have already drawn attention to 
the comparative sterility of the Italian mind during the Roman 
period and its abundant fertility since the Renaissance of learn- 
ing. The English mind again had a phase of brightness in 
the seventh and eighth centuries, and it did not shine again 
until the fifteenth. Again, the mind of the Arabs, as we shall 
presently tell, blazed out like a star for half a dozen generations 
after the appearance of Islam, having never achieved anything 
of importance before or since. On the other hand, there was 
always a great deal of scattered inventiveness in China, and 
the progress of Chinese art witnesses to new movements and 
vigorous innovations. We exaggerate the reverence of the Chi- 
nese for their fathers ; parricide was a far commoner crime 
among the Chinese emperors than it was even among the mlers 
of Persia. Moreover, there have been several liberalizing move- 
ments in China, several recorded struggles against the "ancient 
ways." 

It has already been suggested that phases of real intellectual 
progress in any community seem to be connected with the exist- 
ence of a detached class of men, sufficiently free not to be obliged 
to toil or worry exhaustively about mundane needs, and not rich 
and powerful enough to be tempted into extravagances of lust, 
display, or cruelty. They must have a sense of security, but 
not a conceit of superiority. This class, we have further in- 
sinuated, must be able to talk freely and communicate easily. 
It must not be watched for heresy or persecuted for any 
ideas it may express. Such a happy state of affairs certainly 
prevailed in Greece during its best days. A class of intelli- 
gent, free gentlefolk is indeed evident in histoiy whenever 
there is a record of bold philosophy or effective scientific 
advances. 

In the days of T'ang and Sung and Ming there must have 
been an abundance of pleasantly circumstanced people in China 
of just the class that supplied most of the young men of the 
Academy at Athens, or the bright intelligences of Renaissance 
Italy, or the members of the London Royal Society, that mother 
society of modern science; and yet China did not produce in 



558 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

these periods of opportunity any such large beginnings of re- 
corded and analyzed fact. 

If we reject the idea that there is some profound racial dif- 
ference between China and the West which makes the Chinese 
by nature conservative and the West by nature progressive, then 
we are forced to look for the operating cause of this difference 
in progressiveness in some other direction. Many people are 
disposed to find that operating cause which has, in spite of 
her original advantages, retarded China so greatly during the 
last four or five centuries, in the imprisonment of the Chinese 
mind in a script and in an idiom of thought so elaborate and 
so difficult that the mental energy of the country has been largely 
consumed in acquiring it. This view deserves examination. 

We have already given an account in Chap, xvi of the 
peculiarities of Chinese writing and of the Chinese language. 
The Japanese writing is derived from the Chinese, and consists 
of a more rapidly written system of forms. A great number 
of these forms are ideograms taken over from the Chinese and 
used exactly as the Chinese ideograms are used, but also a 
number of signs are used to express syllables ; there is a Japa- 
nese syllabary after the fashion of the Sumerian syllabary 
we have described in Chap. xvi. The Japanese writing re- 
mains a clumsy system, as clumsy as cuneiform, though not so 
clumsy as Chinese; and there has been a movement in Japan 
to adopt a Western alphabet. Korea long ago went a step 
farther and developed a true alphabet from the same Chinese 
origins. With these exceptions all the great writing systems 
now in use in the world are based on the Mediterranean alpha- 
bets, and are beyond comparison more easily learnt and mastered 
than the Chinese. This means that while other peoples learn 
merely a comparatively simple and straightforward method of 
setting down the language with which they are familiar, the 
Chinaman has to master a great multitude of complex word 
signs and word groups. He must not simply learn the signs, 
but the established grouping of those signs to represent various 
meanings. He must familiarize himself, therefore, with a 
number of exemplary classical works. Consequently in China, 
while you will find great numbers of people who know the 
sig-nificance of certain frequent and familiar characters, you 
discover only a few whose knowledge is sufficiently extensive 
to grasp the meaning of a newspaper paragraph, and still fewer 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 559 

who can read any subtlety of intention or fine shades of mean- 
ing. In a lesser degree this is true also of Japan. No doubt 
European readers, especially oi such word-rich languages as 
English or Eussian, vary greatly among themselves in regard 
to the extent of books they can understand and how far they 
understand them ; their power varies according to their vocabu- 
laries ; but the corresponding levels of understanding among 
the Chinese represent a far greater expenditure of time and 
labour upon their attainment. A mandarin's education in 
China is, mainly, learning to read. 

And it may be that the consequent preoccupation of the edu- 
cated class during its most susceptible years upon the Chinese 
classics gave it a bias in favour of this traditional learning upon 
which it had spent so much time and energy. Few men who 
have toiled to build up ajiy system of knowledge in their minds 
will willingly scrap it in favour of something strange and new ; 
this disposition is as characteristic of the West as of the East; 
it is shown as markedly by the scholars of the British and 
American universities as by any Chinese mandarins, and the 
British at the present time, in spite of the great and manifest 
advantages in popular education and national propaganda the 
change would give them, refitse to make any move from their 
present barbaric orthography towards a phonetic alphabet and 
spelling. The peculiarities of the Chinese script, and the edu- 
cational system arising out of that script, must have acted age 
after age as an invincible filter that favoured the plastic and 
scholarly mind as against the restive and orginating type, and 
kept the latter out of positions of influence and authority. There 
is much that is plausible in this explanation. 

There have been several attempts to simplify the Chinese 
writing and to adopt an alphabetical system. In the early days 
of Buddhism in China, when there was a considerable amount 
of translation from Sanscrit, Indian influences came near to 
achieving this end; two Chinese alphabets were indeed in- 
vented, and each had some little use. But what hindered the 
general adoption of these, and what stands in the way of any 
phonetic system of Chinese writing to-day, is this, that while 
the literary script and phraseology is the same from one end 
of China to the other, the spoken language of the common 
people, both in pronunciation and in its familiar idioms, varies 
so widel}^ that men from one province may be incomprehensible 



560 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to men from another. There is, however, a "standard Chinese," 
a rather bookish spoken idiom, which is generally understood 
by educated people; and it is upon the possibility of applying 
an alphabetical system of writing to this standard Chinese that, 
the hopes of modem educational refonners in China are based 
at the present time. For fresh attempts are now being made to 
release the Chinese mind from this ancient entanglement. 

A Chinese alphabet has been fomied ; it is taught in the com- 
mon schools, and newspapers and pamphlets are issued in it. 
And the rigid examination system that killed all intellectual 
initiatives has been destroyed. There has also been a consider- 
able simplification in the direction of introducing spoken idioms 
into written Chinese. This makes for ease and lucidity; even 
in the old characters such Chinese is more easily read and writ- 
ten, and it is far better adapted than classical Chinese to the 
needs of modem literary expression. 

The very success and early prosperity and general content- 
ment of China in the past must have worked to justify in that 
land all the natural self-complacency and consen'atism of man- 
kind. No animal will change when its conditions are ''good 
enough" for present survival. And in this matter man is still 
an animal. Until the nineteenth century, for more than two 
thousand years, there was little in the history of China that 
could cause any serious doubts in the mind of a Chinaman of 
the general superiority of his own civilization to that of the rest 
of the world, and there was no reason apparent therefore for any 
alteration. China produced a profusion of beautiful art, some 
delightful poetry, astonishing cookery, and thousands of mil- 
lions of glowingly pleasant lives generation after generation. 
Her ships followed her marvellous inland waterways, and put 
to sea but rarely, and then only to India or Borneo as their 
utmost adventure.^ (Until the sixteenth century we must re- 
member European seamen never sailed out into the Atlantic 
Ocean. The Norse discovery of America, the Phcenician cir- 
cumnavigation of Africa, were exceptional feats.) And these 
things were attained without any such general boredom, servi- 
tude, indignity, and misery as underlay the nile of the rich 
in the Roman Empire. There was much poverty, much dis- 
content, but it was not massed poverty, it was not a necessary 

* But Mr. Vogan tells me that rock carvings of a distinctively Chinese 
character have been found in New Zealand and New Caledonia. 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 561 

popular discontent.. For a thousand years the CUiinese system, 
though it creaked and swayed at times, seemed proof against 
decay. Dynastic changes there were, rebellions, phases of dis- 
order, famines, pestilences ; two great invasions that set foreign 
dynasties upon the throne of the Son of Heaven, but. no such 
shock as to revolutionize the order of the daily round. The 
emperors and dynasties might come and go ; the mandarins, the 
examinations, the classics, and the traditions and habitual life 
remained. China's civilization had already reached its culmina- 
tion in the seventh century a.d., its crowning period was the 
Tang period ; and though it continued to spread slowly and 
steadily into Annam, into Cambodia, into Siam, into Tibet, 
into Nepal, Korea, Mongolia, and Manchuria, there is hence- 
forth little more than such geographical progress to record of 
it in this history for a thousand years. 



In the year 629, the year after the arrival of Muhammad's 
envoys at C-anton and thirty odd years after the landing of 
Pope Gregory's missionaries in England, a certain learned and 
devout Buddhist named Yuan Chwang started out from Sian-fu, 
Tai-tsung's capital, upcm a great journey to India. He was 
away sixteen years, he returned in 645, and he wrote an ac- 
count of his travels which is treasured as a Chinese classic. 
One or two points about his experiences are to be noted here 
because they contribute to our general review of the state of 
the world in the seventh century a.d. 

Yuan Chwang was as eager for marvels and as credulous as 
Herodotus, and without the latter writer's fine sense of history ; 
he could never pass a monument or ruin without learning some 
fabulous story about it ; Chinese ideas of the dignity of literature 
j>erhaps prevented him from telling us much detail of how he 
travelled, who were his attendants, how he was lodged, or what 
he ate and how he paid his expenses — details precious to the 
historian ; nevertheless, he gives us a series of illuminating 
flashes upon China, Central Asia, and India in the period now 
under consideration. 

His journey was an enormous one. He went and came back 
hy way of the Pamirs. He went by the northern route, crossing 
the desert of Gobi, passing along the southern slopes of the 



562 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Thien Shan, skirting the great deep blue lake of Issik Kul, and 
so to Tashkend and Samarkand, and then more or less in the 
footsteps of Alexander the Great southward to the Khyber Pass 
and Peshawar. He returned by the southern route, crossing 
the Pamirs from Afghanistan to Kashgar, and so along the 
line of retreat the Yue-Chi had followed in the reverse direc- 
tion seven centuries before, and by Yarkand, along the slopes of 
the Kuen Lun to rejoin his former route near the desert end of 



yuAisr CHW?iKG-^5 route i?onv Chixw, to iruiix , &ig-^5A.v. 




the Great Wall. Each route involved some hard mountaineer- 
ing. His journey ings in India are untraceable ; he was there 
fourteen years, and he went all over the peninsula from Nepal 
to Ceylon. 

At that time there was an imperial edict forbidding foreign 
travel, so that Yuan Chwang started from Sian-fu like an es- 
caping criminal. There was a pursuit to prevent him carrying 
out his project. How he bought a lean red-coloured horse that 
knew the desert paths from a strange grey-beard, how he dodged 
a frontier guard-house with the help of a "foreign person" who 
made him a bridge of brushwood lower down the river, how he 
crossed the desert guided by the bones of men and cattle, how 
he saw a mirage, and how twice he narrowly escaped being shot 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 56S 

by arrows when he was gettino- water near the watch-towers on 
the desert track, the reader will find in the Life. He lost his 
way in the desert of Gobi, and for fonr nights and five days 
he had no water ; when he was in the mountains among the 
glaciers, twelve of his party were frozen to death. All this 
is in the Life; he tells little of it in his own account of his 
travels. 

He shows us the Turks, this new development of the Hun 
tradition, in possession not only of what is now Turkestan, but 
all along the northern route. He mentions many cities and 
considerable cultivation. He is entertained by various rulers, 
allies of or more or less nominally tributaries to China, and 
among others by the Khan of the Turks, a magnificent person 
in green satin, with his long hair tied with silk. 

"The gold embroidery of this grand tent shone with a daz- 
zling splendour ; the ministers of the presence in attendance sat 
on mats in long rows on either side all dressed in magnificent 
brocade robes, while the rest of the retinue on duty stood be- 
hind. You saw that although it was a case of a frontier ruler, 
yet there was an air of distinction and elegance. The Khan 
came out from his tent about thirty paces to meet Yuan Chwang, 
who, after a courteous greeting, entered the tent. . . . After a 
short interval envoys from China and Kao-chang were admitted 
and presented their despatches and credentials, which the Khan 
penised. He was much elated, and caused the envoys to be 
seated ; then he ordered wine and music for himself and them 
and grape-syrup for the pilgrim. Hereupon all pledged each 
other, and the filling and draining of the winecups made a din 
and bustle, while the mingled music of various instruments rose 
loud: although the airs were the popular strains of foreigners, 
yet they pleased the senses and exhilarated the mental faculties. 
After a little, piles of roasted beef and mutton were served for 
the others, and lawful food, such as cakes, milk, candy, honey, 
and grapes, for the pilgrim. After the entertainment, grape- 
syrup was again served and the Khan invited Yuan Chwang to 
improve the occasion, whereupon the pilgrim expounded the 
doctrines of the 'ten virtues,' compassion for animal life, and 
the paramitas and emancipation. The Khan, raising his hands, 
bowed, and gladly believed and accepted the teaching." 

Yuan Chwang's account of Samarkand is of a large and pros- 
perous city, "a great commercial entrepot, the country about it 



564 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

very fertile, abounding; in trees and ilowers and yielding many 
fine horses. Its inhabitants were skilful craftsmen, smart and 
energetic." At that time we must remember there was hardly 
such a thing as a town in Anglo-Saxon England. 

As his narrative approached his experiences in India, how- 
ever, the pious and learned pilgrim in Yuan Chwang got the 
better of the traveller, and the book becomes congested with 
monstrous stories of incredible miracles. Nevertheless, we get 
an impression of houses, clothing, and the like, closely re- 
sembling those of the India of to-day. Then, as now, the 
kaleidoscopic variety of an Indian crowd contrasted with the 
blue uniformity of the multitude in China. In the time of 
Buddha it is doubtful if there were reading and writing in 
India; now reading and writing were quite common accom 
plishments. Yuan Chwang gives an interesting account of u 
great Buddhist university at Nalanda, where iiiins have quite 
recently been discovered and excavated. Nalanda and Taxilla 
seem to have been considerable educational centres as early as 
the opening of the schools of Athens. The caste system Yuan 
Chwang found fully established in spite of Buddha, and the 
Brahmins were now altogether in the ascendant. He names 
the four main castes we have mentioned in Chap, xviii., § 4 
(q.v.), but his account of their functions is rather different. The 
Sudras, he says, were the tillers of the soil. Indian writers say 
that their function was to wait upon the three "twice bom" 
castes above them. 

But, as we have already intimated, Yuan Chwang's account 
of Indian realities is swamped by his accumulation of legends 
and pious inventions. For these he had come, and in these he 
rejoiced. The rest, as we shall see, was a task that had been 
set him. The faith of Buddha which in the days of Asoka, 
and even so late as Kaniska, was still pure enough to I)e a 
noble inspiration, we now discover absolutely lost in a wilder- 
ness of preposterous rubbish, a philosophy of endless Buddhas, 
tales of manifestations and marvels like a Christmas pantomime, 
immaculate conceptions by six-tusked elephants, charitable 
princes giving themselves up to be eaten by starving tigresses, 
temples built over a sacred nail-paring, and the like. We can- 
not give such stories here ; if the reader likes that sort of thing, 
he must go to the publications of the Royal Asiatic Society or 
the India Society, where he will find a delirium of such imagi- 



SEVEN CENTURIES IN ASIA 565 

nations. And in competition with this Bnddhism, intellectually 
undermined as it now was and smothered in gilded decoration, 
Brahminism was everywhere gaining ground again, as Yuan 
Chwang notes with regret. 

Side by side with these evidences of a vast intellectual decay 
in India we may note the repeated appearance in Yuan 
Chwang's narrative of ruined and deserted cities. Much of 
the country was still suffering from the ravages of the Ephtha- 
lites and the consequent disorders. Again and again we find 
such passages as this: *'He went north-east through a gTeat 
forest, the road being a narrow, dangerous path, with wild 
buffalo and wild elephants, and robbers and hunters always in 
wait to kill travellers, and emerging from the forest he reached 
the country of Kou-shih-na-ka-lo (Kusinagara). The city walls 
were in ruins, and the towns and villages were deserted. The 
brick foundations of the 'old city' (that is, the city which had 
been the capital) were above ten li in circuit; there were very 
few inhabitants, the interior of the city being a wild waste." 
This ruin was, however, by no means universal ; there is at 
least as much mention of crowded cities and villages and busy 
cultivations. 

The Life tells of many hardships upon the return journey : 
he fell among robbers; the great elephant that was carrying 
the bulk of his possessions was drowned ; he had much difficulty 
in getting fresh transport. Here we cannot deal with these 
adventures. 

The return of Yuan Chwang to Sian-fu, the Chinese capital, 
was, we gather, a triumph. Advance couriers must have told 
of his coming. There was a public holiday ; the streets were 
decorated by gay banners and made glad with music. He was 
escorted into the city with great pomp and ceremony. Twenty 
horses were needed to carry the spoils of his travels ; he had 
brought with him hundreds of Buddhist books written in San 
scrit, and made of trimmed leaves of palm and birch bark strung 
together in layers ; he had many images great and small of 
Buddha, in gold, silver, crystal, and sandal-wood ; he had holy 
pictures, and no fewer than one hundred and fifty well authen- 
ticated true relics of Buddha. Yuan Chwang was presented to 
the emperor, who treated him as a personal friend, took him 
into the palace, and questioned him day by day about the won- 
ders of these stranpe lands in which he had stayed so long. 



566 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

But while the emperor asked about India, the pilgrim was 
disposed only to talk about Buddhism. 

The subsequent history of Yuan Chwang contains two inci- 
dents that throw light upon the mental workings of this great 
monarch, Tai-tsung, who was probably quite as much a. Moslem 
as he was a Christian or a Buddhist. The trouble about all 
religious specialists is that they know too much about their 
own religion and how it differs from others; the advantage, or 
disadvantage, of such creative statesmen as Tai-tsung and Con- 
stantine the Great is that they know comparatively little of 
such matters. Evidently the fundamental good of all these 
religions seemed to Tai-tsung to be much the same fundamental 
good. So it was natural to him to propose that Yuan Chwang 
should now give up the religious life and come into his foreign 
office, a proposal that Yuan Chwang would not entertain for a 
moment. The emperor then insisted at least upon a written 
account of the travels, and so got this classic we treasure. And 
finally Tai-tsung proposed to this highly saturated Buddhist 
that he should now use his knowledge of Sanscrit in translating 
the works of the great Chinese teacher, Lao Tse, so as to make 
them available for Indian readers. It seemed, no doubt, to 
the emperor a fair return and a useful service to the funda- 
mental good that lies beneath all religions. On the whole, he 
thought Lao Tse might very well rank with or even a little 
above Buddha, and therefore that if his work was put before 
the Brahmins, they would receive it gladly. In much the same 
spirit Constantine the Great had done his utmost to make Arius 
and Athanasius settle down amicably together. But naturally 
enough this suggestion was repulsed by Yuan Chwang. He 
retired to a monastery and spent the rest of his years translating 
as much as he could of the Buddhist literature he had brought 
with him into elegant Chinese writing. 



XXXI 

MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 

1. Arabia Before Muhammad. § 2. Life of Muhammad to 
the Hegira. § 3. Muhammad Becomes a Fighting Prophet. 
§ 4. The Teachings of Islam. § 5". The Caliphs Ahu Bekr 
and Omar. § 6. The Great Days of the Omayijads. § 7. 
The Decay of Islam Under the Ahbasids. § 8. The hitel- 
lectual Life of Arab Islam. 



WE have already described how in a.d. 628 the courts of 
Heracliiis, of Kavadh, and of Tai-tsung were visited 
by Arab envoys sent from a certain Muhammad, "The 
Prophet of God," at the small trading town of Medina in Arabia. 
We must tell now who this prophet was who had arisen among 
the nomads and traders of the Arabian desert. 

From time immemorial Arabia, except for the fertile strip 
of the Yemen to the south, had been a land of nomads, the 
headquarters and land of origin of the Semitic peoples. From 
Arabia at various times waves of these nomads had drifted 
north, east, and west into the early civilizations of Egypt, the 
Mediterranean coast, and Mesopotamia. We have noted in 
this history how the Sumerians were swamped and overcome 
by such Semitic waves, how the Semitic Phoenicians and 
Canaanites established themselves along the eastern shores of 
the Mediterranean, how the Babylonians and Assyrians were 
settled Semitic peoples, how the Hyksos conquered Egypt, how 
the Arameans established themselves in Syria with Damascus 
as their capital, and how the Hebrews partially conquered their 
"Promised Land." At some unknown date the Chaldeans 
drifted in from Eastern Arabia and settled in the old southern 
Sumerian lands. With each invasion first this and then that 
section of the Semitic peoples comes into history. But each of 

567 



568 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

such swarmings still leaves a tribal nucleus behind to supply 
fresh invasions in the future. 

The history of the more highly organized empires of the 
horse and iron period, the empires of roads and writing, shows 
Arabia thrust like a wedge between Egypt, Palestine, and the 
Euphrates-Tigris country, and still a reservoir of nomadic tribes 
who raid and trade and exact tribute for the immunity and 
protection of caravans. There are temporary and flimsy subju- 
gations. Egypt, Persia, Macedonia, Pome, Syria, Constanti- 
nople, and again Persia claim some unreal suzerainty in turn 
over Arabia, profess some unsubstantial protection. Under 
Trajan there was a Roman province of "Arabia," which in- 
cluded the then fertile region of the Hauran and extended as 
far as Petra. Now and then some Arab chief and his trading 
city rises to temporary splendour. Such was that Odenathus 
of Palmyra, whose brief career we have noted and another 
such transitory desert city whose ruins still astonish the traveller 
was Baalbek. 

After the destniction of Palmyra, the desert Arabs began 
to be spoken of in the Fioman and Persian records as Saracens. 

In the time of Chosroes II, Persia claimed a certain ascend- 
ancy over Arabia, and maintained officials and tax collectors in 
the Yemen. Before that time the Yemen had been under the 
rule of the Abyssinian Christians for some years, and before 
that for seven centuries it had had native princes professing, 
be it noted, the Jewish faith. 

Until the opening of the seventh century a.d. there were no 
signs of any unwonted or dangerous energy in the Arabian 
deserts. The life of the country was going on as it had gone 
on for long generations. Wherever there were fertile patches, 
wherever, that is, there was a spring or a well, a scanty agri- 
cultural population subsisted, living in walled towns because 
of the Bedouin who wandered with their sheep, cattle, and 
horses over the desert. Upon the main caravan routes the chief 
towns rose to a certain second-rate prosperity, and foremost 
among them were Medina and Mecca. In the beginning of the 
seventh century Medina was a town of about 15,000 inhabitants 
all told; Mecca may have had twenty or twenty five thousand. 
Medina was a comparatively well-watered town, and possessed 
abundant date groves ; its inhabitants were Yemenites, from 
the fertile land to the south. Mecca was a town of a different 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 



569 



character, built about a spring- of water with a bitter taste, and 
inhabited by recently settled Bedouin. 

Mecca was not merely nor primarily a trading centre j it was 
a place of pilgrimage. Among the Arab tribes there had long 
existed a sort of Amphictyony centering upon Mecca and cer- 
tain other sanctuaries; there were months of truce to war and 



"Mlp of^ ARAB I A ^illd ad jacezvtcoiiiiivics 

Fertilz laiul .... 
Sandy desert — 




blood feuds, and customs of protection and hospitality for the 
pilgrim. In addition there had grown up an Olympic element 
in these gatherings ; the Arabs were discovering possibilities of 
beauty in their language, and there were recitations of war 
poetry and love songs. The sheiks of the tribes, under a "king 
of the poets," sat in judgTnent and awarded prizes ; the prize 
sonirs were sung through all Arabia. 

The Kaaba, the sanctuary at Mecca, was of very ancient date. 
It was a small square temple of black stones, which had for its 
corner-stone a meteorite. This meteorite was regarded as a 



570 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

god, and all the little tribal gods of Arabia were under his pro- 
tection. The permanent inhabitants of Mecca were a tribe of 
Bedouin who had seized this temple and constituted themselves 
its guardians. To them there came in the months of truce a 
great incourse of people, who marched about the Kaaba cere- 
monially, bowed themselves, and kissed the stone, and also en- 
gaged in trade and poetical recitations. The Meccans profited 
much from these visitors. 

All of this is very reminiscent of the religious and political 
state of affairs in Greece fourteen centuries earlier. But the 
paganism of these more primitive Arabs was already being 
assailed from several directions. There had been a great 
proselytizing of Arabs during the period of the Maccabaeans and 
Herods in Judea ; and, as we have already noted, the Yemen 
had been in succession under the rule of Jews (Arab proselytes 
to Judaism, i.e.), Christians, and Zoroastrians. It is evident 
that there must have been plenty of religious discussion during 
the pilgrimage fairs at Mecca and the like centres. Naturally 
enough Mecca was a stronghold of the old pagan cult which 
gave it its importance and prosperity; Medina, on the other 
hand, had Jewish proclivities, and there were Jewish settle- 
ments near by. It was inevitable that Mecca and Medina should 
be in a state of rivalry and bickering feud. 

§ 2 

It was in Mecca about the year a.d. 570 that Muhammad, 
the founder of Islam, was born. He was born in considerable 
poverty, and even by the standards of the desert he was unedu- 
cated ; it is doubtful if he ever learnt to write. He was for 
some years a shepherd's boy; then he became the servant of a 
certain Kadi j a, the widow of a rich merchant. Probably he 
had to look after her camels or help in her trading operations ; 
and he is said to have travelled with caravans to the Yemen and 
to Syria. He does not seem to have been a very useful trader, 
but he had the good fortune to find favour in the lady's eyes, 
and she married him, to the great annoyance of her family. He 
was then only twenty-five years old. It is uncertain if his wife 
was much older, though tradition declares she was forty. After 
the marriage he probably made no more long journeys. There 
were several children, one of whom was named Abd Manif — 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 571 

that is to say, the servant of the Meccan god Manif, which dem- 
onstrates that at that time Muhammad had made no religious 
discoveries. 

Until he was forty he did indeed live a particularly undis- 
tinguished life in Mecca, as the husband of a prosperous wife. 
There may be some ground for the supposition that he became 
partner in a business in agricultural produce. To anyone visit- 
ing Mecca about a.d. 600 he would probably have seemed some- 
thing of a loafer, a rather shy, good-looking individual, sitting 
about and listening to talk, a poor poet, and an altogether 
second-rate man. 

About his internal life we can only speculate. Imaginative 
writers have supposed that he had great spiritual struggles, that 
he went out into the desert in agonies of doubt and divine desire. 
"In the silence of the desert night, in the bright heat of noon- 
tide desert day, he, as do all men, had known and felt him- 
self alone yet not in solitude, for the desert is of God, and in 
the desert no man may deny Him." ^ Maybe that was so, but 
there is no evidence of any such desert trips. Yet he was cer- 
tainly thinking deeply of the things about him. Possibly he 
had seen Christian churches in Syria ; almost certainly he 
knew much of the Jews and their religion, and he heard their 
scorn for this black stone of the Kaaba that ruled over the three 
hundred odd tribal gods of Arabia. He saw the pilgrimage 
crowds, and noted the threads of insincerity and superstition 
in the paganism of the town. It oppressed his mind. The 
Jews had perhaps converted him to a belief in the One True 
God, without his knowing what had happened to him. 

At last he could keep these feelings to himself no longer. 
When he was forty he began to talk about the reality of God, at 
first apparently only to his wife and a few intimates. He 
produced certain verses, which he declared had been revealed 
to him by an angel. They involved an assertion of the unity 
of God and some acceptable generalizations about righteousness. 
He also insisted upon a future life, the fear of hell for the 
negligent and evil, and the reservation of paradise for the be- 
liever in the One God. Except for his claim to be a new 
prophet, there does not seem to have been anything very new 
about these doctrines at the time, but this was seditious teach- 
ing for Mecca, which partly subsisted upon its polytheistic cult, 
'Mark Sykes. 



572 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and which was therefore holding on to idols when all the rest 
of the world was giving them up. Like Mani, Muhammad 
claimed that the prophets before him, and especially Jesus 
and Abraham, had been divine teachers, but that he crowned 
and completed their teaching. Buddhism, however, he did not 
name, probably because he had never heard of Buddha. Desert 
Arabia was in a theological backwater. 

For some years the new religion was the secret of a small 
group of simple people, Kadija, the Prophet's wife, Ali, an 
adopted son, Zeid, a slave, and Abu Bekr, a friend and admirer. 
For some years it was an obscure sect in a few households of 
Mecca, a mere scowl and muttering at idolatry, so obscure and 
unimportant that the leading men of the town did not trouble 
about it in the least. Then it gathered strength. Muhammad 
began to preach more openly, to teach the doctrine of a future 
life, and to threaten idolaters and unbelievers with hell fire. 
He seems to have preached with considerable effect. It ap- 
peared to many that he was aiming at a sort of dictatorship in 
Mecca, and drawing many susceptible and discontented people 
to his side ; and an attempt was made to discourage and suppress 
the new movement. 

Mecca was a place of pilgrimage and a sanctuary ; no blood 
could be shed within its walls; nevertheless, things were made 
extremely disagi-eeable for the followers of the new teacher. 
Boycott and confiscation were used against them. Some were 
driven to take refuge in Christian Abyssinia. But the Prophet 
himself went unscathed because he was well connected, and 
his opponents did not want to begin a blood feud. We cannot 
follow the fluctuations of the struggle here, but it is necessary 
to note one perplexing incident in the new Prophet's career, 
which, says Sir Mark Sykes, ''proves him to have been an Arab 
of the Arabs." After all his insistence upon the oneness of 
God, he wavered. He came into the courtyard of the Kaaba, 
and declared that the gods and goddesses of Mecca might, 
after all, be real, might be a species of saints with a power of 
intercession. 

His recantation was received with enthusiasm, but he had 
no sooner made it than he repented, and his repentance shows 
that he had indeed the fear of God in him. His lapse from 
honesty proves him honest. He did all he could to repair the 
evil he had done. He said that the devil had possessed his 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 573 

tongue, and denounced idolatry a£i;ain with renewed vigour. 
The struggle against the antiquated deities, after a brief interval 
of peace, was renewed again more grimly, and with no further 
hope of reconciliation. 

For a time the old interests had the upper hand. At the 
end of ten years of prophesying, Muhammad found himself a 
man of fifty, and altogether unsuccessful in Mecca. Kadi j a, his 
first wife, was dead, and several of his chief supporters had also 
recently died. He sought a refuge at the neighbouring town of 
Tayf, but Tayf drove him out with stones and abuse. Then, 
when the world looked darkest to him, opportunity opened be- 
fore him. He found he had been weighed and approved in an 
unexpected quarter. The city of Medina was much torn by 
internal dissension, and many of its people, during the time of 
pilgrimage to Mecca, had been attracted by Muhammad's teach- 
ing. Probably the numerous Jews in Medina had shaken the 
ancient idolatry of the people. An invitation was sent to him 
to come and rule in the name of his God in Medina. 

He did not go at once. He parleyed for two years, sending a 
disciple to preach in Medina and destroy the idols there. Then 
he began sending such followers as he had in Mecca to Medina 
to await his coming there; he did not want to trust himself to 
unknown adherents in a strange city. This exodus of the faith- 
ful continued, until at last only he and Abu Bekr remained. 

In spite of the character of Mecca as a sanctuary, he was 
very nearly murdered there. The elders of the town evidently 
knew of what was going on in Medina, and they realized the 
danger to them if this seditious prophet presently found him- 
self master of a town on their main caravan route to Syria. 
Custom must bow to imperative necessity, they thought ; and 
they decided that, blood feud or no blood feud, Muhammad 
must die. They arranged that he should be murdered in his 
bed ; and in order to share the guilt of this breach of sanctuary 
they appointed a committee to do this, representing every 
family in the city except Muhammad's own. But Muhammad 
had already prepared his flight ; and when in the night they 
rushed into his room, they found Ali, his adopted son, sleeping, 
or feigning sleep, on his bed. 

The flight (the Hegira) was an adventurous one, the pursuit 
being pressed hard. Expert desert trackers sought for the 
spoor to the north of the town, but Muhammad and Abu Bekr 



574 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

had gone south to certain caves where camels and provisions 
were hidden, and thence he made a great detour to Medina. 
There he and his faithful companion arrived, and were received 
with great enthusiasm on September 20, 622. It was the end 
of his probation and the beginning of his power. 

§ 3 

Until the Hegira, until he was fifty-one, the character of 
the founder of Islam is a matter of speculation and dispute. 
Thereafter he is in the light. We discover a man of great 
imaginative power but tortuous in the Arab fashion, and with 
most of the virtues and defects of the Bedouin. 

The opening of his reign was ''very Bedouin." The rule of 
the One God of all the earth, as it was interpreted by Muham- 
mad, began with a series of raids — which for more than a year 
were invariably unsuccessful — upon the caravans of Mecca. 
Then came a grave scandal, the breaking of the ancient cus- 
tomary truce of the Arab Amphictyony in the sacred month of 
Eahab. A party of Moslems, in this season of profound peace, 
treacherously attacked a small caravan and killed a man. It 
was their only success, and they did it by the order of the 
Prophet. 

Presently came a battle. A force of seven hundred men had 
come out from Mecca to convoy home another caravan, and they 
encountered a large raiding party of three hundred. There 
was a fight, the battle of Badr, and the Meccans got the worst 
of it. They lost about fifty or sixty killed and as many 
wounded. Muhammad returned in triumph to Medina, and 
was inspired by Allah and this success to order the assassina- 
tion of a number of his opponents among the Jews in the town 
who had treated his prophetic claims with a disagreeable levity. 

But Mecca resolved to avenge Badr, and at the battle of 
Uhud, near Medina, inflicted an indecisive defeat upon the 
Prophet's followers. Muhammad was knocked down and nearly 
killed, and there was much running away among his followers. 
The Meccans, however, did not push their advantage and enter 
Medina. 

For some time all the energies of the Prophet were concen- 
trated upon rallying his followers, who were evidently much 
dispirited. The Koran records the chastened feelings of those 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 575 

days. "The suras of the Koran," says Sir Mark Sykes, ''which 
are attributed to this period, excel nearly all the others in their 
majesty and sublime conhdence." Here, for the judgment of 
the reader, is an example of these majestic utterances, from 
the recent orthodox translation by the Maulvi Muhammad Ali.^ 

''Oh, you who believe ! If you obey those who disbelieve, 
they will turn you back upon your heels, so you will turn back 
losers. 

"Nay! Allah is your Patron, and He is the best of the 
helpers. 

"We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, 
because they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down 
no authority, and their abode is the fire ; and evil is the abode 
of the unjust. 

"And certainly Allah made good to you his promise, when 
you slew them by His permission, until when you became weak- 
hearted and disputed about the affair and disobeyed after He 
had shown you that which you loved; of you were some who 
desired this world, and of you were some who desired the here- 
after ; then He turned you away from them that He might try 
you ; and He has certainly pardoned you, and Allah is Gracious 
to the believers. 

"When you ran off precipitately, and did not wait for any- 
one, and the Apostle was calling you from your rear, so He 
gave you another sorrow instead of your sorrow, so that you 
might not grieve at what had escaped you, nor at what befell 
you ; and Allah is aware of what you do. 

"Then after sorrow he sent down security upon you, a calm 
coming upon a party of you, and there was another party whom 
their own souls had rendered anxious ; they entertained about 
Allah thoughts of ignorance quite unjustly, saying: We have 
no hand in this affair. Say, surely the affair is wholly in the 
hands of Allah. They conceal within their souls what they 
would not reveal to you. They say: Had we any hand in the 
affair, we would not have been slain here. Say : had you re- 
mained in your houses, those for whom slaughter was ordained 
would certainly have gone forth to the places where they would 
be slain, and that Allah might test what was in your breasts 
and that He might purge what was in your hearts ; and Allah 
knows what is in the breasts. 

* Published by the Islamic Review. 



576 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

''As for tbose of you who turned back on tlie day when the 
two armies met, only the devil sought to cause them to make 
a slip on account of some deeds they had done, and cer- 
tainly Allah has pardoned them ; surely Allah is Forgiving, 
Forbearing." 

Inconclusive hostilities continued for some years, and at last 
Mecca made a crowning eifort to stamp out for good and all the 
growing power of Medina. A mixed force of no fewer than 
10,000 men was scraped together, an enormous force for the 
time and country. It was, of course, an entirely undisciplined 
force of footmen, horsemen, and camel riders, and it was pre- 
pared for nothing but the usual desert scrimmage. Bows, 
spears, and swords were its only weapons. When at last it 
arrived amid a vast cloud of dust in sight of the hovels and 
houses of Medina, instead of a smaller force of the same kind 
drawn up for battle, as it had expected, it found a new and 
entirely disconcerting phenomenon, a trench and a wall. As- 
sisted by a Persian convert, Muhammad had entrenched himself 
in Medina ! 

This trench struck the Bedouin miscellany as one of the 
most unsportsmanlike things that had ever been known in the 
history of the world. They rode about the place. They 
shouted their opinion of the whole business to the besieged. 
They discharged a few arrows, and at last encamped to argue 
about this amazing outrage. They could arrive at no decision. 
Muhammad v/ould not come out ; the rains began to fall, the 
tents of the allies got wet and the cooking difficult, views be- 
came divergent and tempers gave way, and at last this great 
host dwindled again into its constituent parts without ever hav- 
ing given battle (627). The bands dispersed north, east, and 
south, became clouds of dust, and ceased to matter. Near 
Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom Muhammad was 
already incensed because of their disrespect for his theology. 
They had shown a disposition to side with the probable victor 
in this last struggle, and Muhammad now fell upon them, slew 
all the men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and 
children. Possibly many of their late allies were among the 
bidders for these slaves. Never again after this quaint failure 
did Mecca make an effective rally against Muhammad, and one 
by one its leading men came over to his side. 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 577 

We need not follow the windings of the truce and the treaty 
that finally extended the rule of the Prophet to Mecca. The 
gist of the agreement was that the faithful should turn towards 
Mecca when they prayed instead of turning towards Jerusalem, 
as they had hitherto done, and that Mecca should be the pil- 
grimage centre of the new faith. So long as the pilgrimage 
continued, the men of -Mecca, it would seem, did not care very 
much whether the crowd assembled in the name of one god or 
many. Muhammad was getting more and more hopeless of any 
extensive conversion of the Jews and Christians, and he was 
ceasing to press his idea that all these faiths really worshipped 
the same One God. Allah was becoming more and more his own 
special God, tethered now by this treaty to the meteoric stone of 
the Kaaba, and less and less the father of all mankind. Already 
the Prophet had betrayed a disposition to make a deal with 
Mecca, and at last it was effected. The lordship of Alecca was 
well worth the concession. Of comings and goings and a final 
conflict we need not tell. In 629 Muhammad came to the town 
as its master. The image of Manif, the god after whom he had 
once named his son, was smashed under his feet as he entered 
the Kaaba. 

Thereafter his power extended, there were battles, treacheries, 
massacres ; but on the whole he prevailed, until he was master 
of all Arabia ; and when he was master of all Arabia in 632, at 
the age of sixty-two, he died. 

Throughout the concluding eleven years of his life after the 
Hegira, there is little to distingiiish the general conduct of 
Muhammad from that of any other welder of peoples into a 
monarchy. The chief difference is his use of a religion of his 
own creation as his cement. He was diplomatic, treacherous, 
ruthless, or compromising as the occasion required and as any 
other Arab king might have been in his place ; and there was 
singularly little spirituality in his kingship. Nor was his do- 
mestic life during his time of power and freedom one of excep- 
tional edification. Until the death of Kadi j a, when he was 
fifty, he seems to have been the honest husband of one wife ; 
but then, as many men do in their declining years, he developed 
a disagi'eeably strong interest in women. 

He married two wives after the death of Kadi j a, one being 
the young Ayesha, who became and remained his favourite and 
most influential partner; and subsequently a number of other 



578 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

women, wives and concubines, were added to his establishment. 
This led to much trouble and confusion, and in spite of many 
special and very helpful revelations on the part of Allah, these 
complications still require much explanation and argument 
from the faithful. There was, for example, a scanda*! about 
Ayesha ; she was left behind on one occasion when the howdah 
and the camel went on, while she was looking for her necklace 
among the bushes ; and so Allah had to inten-ene with some 
heat and denounce her slanderers. Allah also had to speak very 
plainly about the general craving among this household of 
women for "this world's life and its ornature" and for "finery." 
Then there was much discussion because the Prophet first mar- 
ried his young cousin Zainib to his adopted son Zaid, and after- 
wards, "when Zaid had accomplished his want of her," the 
Prophet took her and married her — but, as the inspired book 
makes clear, only in order to show the difference between an 
adopted and a real son. "We gave her to you as a wife, so that 
there should be no difficulty for the believers in respect of the 
wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished their 
want of them, and Allah's command shall be performed." Yet 
surely a simple statement in the Koran should have sufficed with- 
out this excessively practical demonstration. There was, more- 
over, a mutiny in the harem on account of the undue favours 
shown by the Prophet to an Egyptian concubine who had borne 
him a boy, a boy for whom he had a great affection, since none 
of Kadija's sons had survived. These domestic troubles mingle 
inextricably with our impression of the Prophet's personality. 
One of his wives was a Jewess, Safiyya, whom he had married 
on the evening of the battle in which her husband had been 
captured and executed. He viewed the captured women at the 
end of the day, and she found favour in his eyes and was taken 
to his tent. 

These are salient facts in these last eleven years of Muham- 
mad's career. Because he, too, founded a great religion, there 
are those who write of this evidently lustful and rather shifty 
leader as though he were a man to put beside Jesus of Nazareth 
or Gautama or Mani. But it is surely manifest that he was a 
being of a commoner clay ; he was vain, egotistical, tyrannous, 
and a self-deceiver; and it would throw all our history out of 
proportion if, out of an insincere deference to the possible 
Moslem reader, we were to present him in any other light. 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 579 

Yet, unless we balance it, this insistence upon his vanity, 
egotism, self-deception, and hot desire does not complete the 
justice of the case. We must not swing across from the repudia- 
tion of the extravagant pretensions of the faithful to an equally 
extravagant condemnation. Can a man who has no good quali- 
ties hold a friend ? Because those who knew Muhammad best 
believed in him most. Kadija for all her days believed in him 
— but she may have been a fond woman. Abu Bekr is a better 
witness, and he never wavered in his devotion. Abu Bekr be- 
lieved in the Prophet, and it is very hard for anyone who reads 
the history of these times not to believe in Abu Bekr. Ali 
again risked his life for the Prophet in his darkest days. 
Muhammad was no impostor, at any rate, though at times his 
vanity made him behave as though Allah was at his beck and 
call, and as if his thoughts were necessarily God's thoughts. 
And if his bloodstained passion with Safiyya amazes and dis- 
gusts our modern minds, his love for little Ibrahim, the son of 
Mary the Egyptian, and his passionate grief when the child 
died, reinstate him in the fellowship of all those who have 
known love and loss. 

He smoothed the earth over the little grave with his own 
hands. "This eases the afflicted heart," he said. "Though it 
neither profits nor injures the dead, yet it is a comfort to the 
living." 

§ 4 

But the personal quality of Muhammad is one thing and the 
quality of Islam, the religion he founded, is quite another. 
Muhammad was not pitted against Jesus or Mani, and his rela- 
tive stature is only a very secondary question for us ; it is Islam 
which was pitted against the corrupted Christianity of the 
seventh century and against the decaying tradition of the Zoro- 
astrian Magi with which the historian has the greater concern. 
And whether it was through its Prophet or whether it was in 
spite of its Prophet, and through certain accidents in its ori- 
gin and certain qualities of the desert from which it sprang, 
there can be no denying that Islam possesses many fine and 
noble attributes. It is not always through sublime persons 
that great things come into human life. It is the folly of the 
simple disciple which demands miraculous frippery on the 
majesty of truth and immaculate conceptions for righteousness. 



580 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A year before liis death, at the end of the tenth year of the 
Hegira, Muhammad made his last pilgrimage from Medina to 
Mecca. He made then a great sermon to his people of which 
the tradition is as follows. There are, of course, disputes as 
to the authenticity of the words, but there can be no dispute 
that the world of Islam, a world still of three hundred mil- 
lion people, receives them to this day as its rule of life, and to 
a great extent observes it. The reader will note that the first 
paragraph sweeps away all plunder and blood feuds among the 
followers of Islam. The last makes the believing Negro the 
equal of the Caliph. They may not be sublime words, as cer- 
tain utterances of Jesus of Nazareth are sublime ; but they es- 
tablished in the world a great tradition of dignified fair dealing, 
they breathe a spirit of generosity, and they are human and 
workable. They created a society more free from widespread 
cruelty and social oppression than any society had ever been 
in the world before. 

"Ye people : Hearken to my words ; for I know not whether, 
after this year, I shall ever be amongst you here again. Your 
lives and property are sacred and inviolable amongst one 
another until the end of time. 

"The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his in- 
heritance; a testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs. 

"The child belongeth to the parent; and the violator of wed- 
lock shall be stoned. 

"Whoever claimeth falsely another for his father, or another 
for his master, the curse of God and the angels and of all man- 
kind shall rest upon him. 

"Ye people ! Ye have rights demandable of your wives, and 
they have rights demandable of you. Upon them it is incum- 
bent not to violate their conjugal faith nor commit any act 
of open impropriety ; which things if they do, ye have authority 
to shut them up in separate apartments and to beat them with 
stripes, yet not severely. But if they refrain therefrom, clothe 
them and feed them suitably. And treat your women well, for 
they are with you as captives and prisoners ; they have not 
power over anything as regards themselves. And ye have verily' 
taken them on the security of God, and have made their persons 
lawful unto you by the words of God. 

"And your slaves, see that ye feed them with such food as 
ye eat yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 581 

if they commit a fault wliicli ye are not inclined to forgive, 
then sell them, for they are the servants of the Lord, and are 
not to be tormented. 

"Ye people ! hearken to my si>eech and comprehend the same. 
Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. 
All of you are on the same equality." 

This insistence uj>on kindliness and consideration in the daily 
life is one of the main virtues of Islam, but it is not the only 
one. Equally important is the uncompromising monotheism, 
void of any Jewish exclusiveness, which is sustained by the 
Koran. Islam from the outset was fairly proof against the 
theological elalwrations that have perplexed and divided Chris- 
tianity and smothered the spirit of Jesus. And its third source 
of strength has been in the meticulous prescription of methods 
of prayer and worship, and its clear statement of the limited 
and conventional significance of the importance ascribed to 
Mecca. All sacrifice was barred to the faithful ; no loophole 
was left for the sacrificial priest of the old dispensation to come 
back into the new faith. It was not simply a new faith, a purely 
prophetic religion, as the religion of Jesus was in the time 
of Jesus, or the religion of Gautama in the lifetime of Gautama, 
but it was so stated as to remain so. Islam to this day has 
learned doctors, teachers, and preachers; but it has no priests. 

It was full of the spirit of kindliness, generosity, and broth- 
erhood ; it was a simple and understandable religion ; it was in- 
stinct with the chivalrous sentiment of the desert ; and it made 
its appeal straight to the commonest instincts in the composi- 
tion of ordinary men. Against it were pitted Judaism, which 
had made a racial hoard of God ; Christianity talking and 
preaching endlessly now of trinities, doctrines, and heresies 
no ordinary man could make head or tail of; and Mazdaism, 
the cult of the Zoroastrian Magi, who had inspired the crucifix- 
ion of Mani. The bulk of the people to whom the challenge of 
Islam came did not trouble very much whether Muhammad 
was lustful or not, or whether he had done some shifty and 
questionable things; what appealed to them was that this God, 
-Allah, he preached, was by the test of the conscience in their 
hearts a God of righteousness, and that the honest acceptance 
of his doctrine and method opened the door wide in a world of 
uncertainty, treachery, and intolerable divisions to a gTeat and 
increasing brotherhood of trustworthy men on earth, and to a 



582 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

paradise not of perpetual exercises in praise and worship, in 
which saints, priests, and anointed kings were still to have 
the upper places, but of equal fellowship and simple and under- 
standable delights such as their souls craved for. Without any 
ambiguous symbolism, without any darkening of altars or chant- 
ing of priests, Muhammad had brought home those attractive 
doctrines to the hearts of mankind. 

§ 5 

The true embodiment of the spirit of Islam was not Muham- 
mad, but his close friend and supporter, Abu Bekr. There can 
be little doubt that if Muhammad was the mind and imagina- 
tion of primitive Islam, Abu Bekr was its conscience and its 
will. Throughout their life together it was Muhammad who 
said the thing, but it was Abu Bekr who believed the thing. 
When Muhammad wavered, Abu Bekr sustained him. Abu 
Bekr was a man without doubts, his beliefs cut down to acts 
cleanly as a sharp knife cuts. We may feel sure that Abu 
Bekr would never have temporized about the minor gods of 
Mecca, or needed inspirations from Allah to explain his private 
life. When in the eleventh year of the Hegira (632) the 
Prophet sickened of a fever and died, it was Abu Bekr who 
succeeded him as Caliph and leader of the people (Kalifa = 
Successor), and it was the unflinching confidence of Abu Bekr 
in the righteousness of Allah which prevented a split between 
Medina and Mecca, which stamped down a widespread insur- 
rection of the Bedouin against taxation for the common cause, 
and carried out a great plundering raid into Syria that the 
dead Prophet had projected. And then Abu Bekr, with that 
faith which moves mountains, set himself simply and sanely 
to organize the subjugation of the whole world to Allah — with 
little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs— according to those let- 
ters the Prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the 
monarchs of the world. 

And the attempt came near to succeeding. Had there been 
in Islam a score of men, younger men to carry on his work, 
of Abu Bekr's quality, it would certainly have succeeded. It 
came near to succeeding because Arabia was now a centre of 
faith and will, and because nowhere else in the world until 
China was reached, unless it was upon the steppes of Kussia 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 



583 



or Turkestan, was there another community of free-spirited 
men with any power of belief in their rulers and leaders. The 
head of the Byzantine Empire, Heraclius, the conqueror of 
Chosroes II, was past his prime and suffering from dropsy, 
and his empire was exhausted by the long- Persian war. Nor 




had he at any time displayed such exceptional ability as the 
new occasion demanded. The motley of people under his rule 
knew little of him and cared less. Persia was at the lowest 
depths of monarchist degradation, the parricide Kavadh II 
had died after a reign of a few months, and a series of dynas- 
tic intrigues and romantic murders enlivened the palace but 
weakened the country. The war between Persia and the Byzan- 



584 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tine Empire was only furnially concluded abont the time of 
the beginning of Abu Bekr's rule. Both sides had made great 
use of Arab auxiliaries ; over Syria a number of towns and 
settlements of Christianized Arabs were scattered who professed 
a baseless loyalty to Constantinople; the Persian marches be- 
tween Mesopotamia and the desert were under the control of 
an Arab tributary prince, whose capital was at Hira. Arab 
influence was strong in such cities as Damascus, where Christian 
Arab gentlemen would read and recite the latest poetry from the 
desert competitors. There was thus a great amount of easily 
assimilable material ready at hand for Islam. 

And the military campaigns that now began were among the 
most brilliant in the world's history. Arabia had suddenly 
become a garden of fine men. The name of Khalid stands out 
as the brightest star in a constellation of able and devoted 
Moslem generals. Whenever he commanded he was victorious, 
and when the jealousy of the second Caliph, Omar, degraded him 
unjustly and inexcusably,^ he made no ado, but served Allah 
cheerfully and well as a subordinate to those over whom he 
had ruled. We cannot trace the story of this warfare here; 
the Arab armies struck simultaneously at Byzantine Syria and 
the Persian frontier city of Hira, and everywhere they offered 
a choice of three alternatives : either pay tribute, or confess 
the true God and join us, or die. They encountered armies, 
large and disciplined but spiritless araiies, and defeated them. 
And nowhere was there such a thing as a popular resistance. 
The people of the populous irrigation lands of Mesopotamia 
cared not a jot whether they paid taxes tO' Byzantium or Persep- 
olis or to Medina ; and of the two, Arabs or Persian court, the 
Arabs, the Arabs of the great years, were manifestly the cleaner 
people, more just and more merciful. The Christian Arabs 
joined the invaders very readily and so did many Jews. Just 
as in the west, so now in the east, an invasion became a social 
revolution. But here it was also a religious revolution with a 
new and distinctive mental vitality. 

It was Khalid who fought the decisive battle (634) with the 
army of Heraclius upon the banks of the Yannuk, a tributary 
of the Jordan. The legions, as ever, were without proper 

'But Schurtz, in Helmolt's History of the Worlfl, says that the private 
life of the gallant Khalid was a scandal to the faithful. He committed 
adultery, a serious offence in a world of polygamy. 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 585 

cavalry ; for seven centuries the ghost of old Crassus had haunted 
the east in vain; tlie imperial armies relied upon Christian 
Arab auxiliaries, and these deserted to the Moslems as the 
araiies joined issue. A great parade of priests, sacred banners, 
pictures, and holy relics was made by the Byzantine host, and 
it was further sustained by the chanting of monks. But there 
was no magic in the relics and little conviction about the chant- 
ing. On the Arab side of the emirs and sheiks harang-ued the 
troops, and after the ancient Arab fashion the shrill voices of 
women in the rear encouraged their men. The Moslem ranks 
were full of believers before whom shone victory or paradise. 
The battle was never in doubt after the defection of the irre^gu- 
lar cavalry. An attempt to retreat dissolved into a rout and 
became a massacre. The Byzantine army had fought with its 
back to the river, which was presently choked with its dead. 

Thereafter TIeraclius slowly relinquished all Syria, which 
he had so lately won back from the Persians, to his new an- 
tagonists. Damascus soon fell, and a year later the Moslems 
entered Antioch. For a time they had to abandon it again to 
a last effort from Constantinople, but they re-entered it for 
good under Khalid. 

Meanwhile on the eastern front, after a swift initial success 
which gave them Hira, the Persian resistance stiffened. The 
dynastic struggle had ended at last in the coming of a king of 
kings, and a general of ability had been found in Rustam. 
He gave battle at Kadessia (637). His army was just such 
another composite host as Darius had led into Thrace or Alex- 
ander defeated at Issus; it was a medley of levies. He had 
thirty-three war elephants, and he sat on a golden throne upon 
a raised platform behind the Persian ranks, surveying the 
battle, which throne will remind the reader of Herodotus, the 
Hellespont, and Salamis more than a thousand years before. 
The battle lasted three days ; each day the Arabs attacked and 
the Persian host held its ground until nightfall called a truce. 
On the third day the Arabs received reinforcements, and to- 
wards the evening the Persians attempted to bring the strug- 
gle to an end by a charge of elephants. At first the huge 
beasts carried all before them ; then one was wounded pain- 
fully and became uncontrollable, rushing up and down be- 
tween the armies. Its panic affected the others, and for a 
time both armies remained dumbfounded in the red light of 



586 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

sunset, watching the frantic efforts of these grey, squealing 
monsters to escape from the tormenting masses of armed men 
that hemmed them in. It was by the merest chance that at 
last they broke through the Persian and not through the Arab 
array, and that it was the Arabs who were able to charge home 
upon the resulting confusion. The twilight darkened to night, 
but this time the armies did not separate. All through the 
night the Arabs smote in the name of Allah, and pressed upon 
the shattered and retreating Persians. Dawn broke upon the 
vestiges of Rustam's army in flight far beyond the litter of the 
battlefield. Its path was marked by scattered weapons and war 
material, abandoned trahiport, and the dead and dying. The 
platform and the golden fhrone were broken down, and Rus- 
tam lay dead among a heap of dead men. . . . 

Already in 6?>4 Abu Bd*- had died and given place to Omar, 
the Prophet's brother-in-law, as Caliph ; and it was under Omar 
(634-643) that the main conquests of the Moslems occurred. 
The Byzantine Empire was pushed out of Syria altogether. But 
at the Taurus Mountains the Moslem thrust was held. Ar- 
menia was overrun, all Mesopotamia was conquered and Persia 
beyond the rivers. Egypt passed almost passively from Greek 
to Arab ; in a few years the Semitic race, in the name of God and 
His Prophet, had recovered nearly all the dominions it had 
lost to the Aryan Persians a thousand years before. Jerusalem 
fell early, making a treaty without standing siege, and so the 
True Cross which had been carried off by the Persians a dozen 
years before, and elaborately restored by Heraclius, passed once 
more out of the rule of Christians. But it was still in Christian 
hands ; the Christians were to be tolerated, paying only a poll 
tax; and all the churches and all the relics were left in their 
possession. 

Jerusalem made a peculiar condition for its surrender. The 
city would give itself only to the Caliph Omar in person. 
Hitherto he had been in Medina organizing armies and control- 
ling the general campaign. He came to Jerusalem (638), 
and the manner of his coming shows how swiftly the vigour 
and simplicity of the first Moslem onset was being sapped by 
success. He came the six-hundred-mile journey with only one 
attendant ; he was mounted on a camel, and a bag of barley, an- 
other of dates, a water-skin, and a wooden platter were his pro- 
vision for the journey. He was met outside the city by his chief 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 



587 




588 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

captains, robed splendidly in silks and with richly capar- 
isoned horses. At this amazing sight the old man was overcome 
with rage. He slipped down from his saddle, scrabbled up 
dirt and stones with his hands, and pelted these fine gentlemen, 
shouting abuse. What was this insult? What did this finery 
mean ? Where were his warriors ? Where were the desert 
men? He would not let these popinjays escort him. He went 
on with his attendant, and the smart Emirs rode afar off — 
well out of range of his stones. He met the Patriarch of 
Jerusalem, who had apparently taken over the city from its 
Byzantine rulers, alone. With the Patriarch he got on very 
well. They went round the Holy Places together, and Omar, 
now a little appeased, made sly jokes at the expense of his 
too magnificent followers. 

Equally indicative of the tendencies of the time is Omar's 
letter ordering one of his governors who had built himself a 
palace at Kufa, to demolish it again. 

"They tell me," he wrote, "you would imitate the palace of 
Chosroes;^ and that you would even use the gates that once were 
his. Will you also have guards and porters at those gates, as 
Chosroes had ? Will you keep the faithful afar off and deny 
audience to the poor? Would you depart from the custom of 
our Prophet, and be as magnificent as those Persian emperors, 
and descend to hell even as they have done ?" ^ 

§ 6 

Abu Bekr and Omar I are the two master figures in the history 
of Islam. It is not within our scope here to describe the wars 
by which in a hundred and twenty-five years Islam spread it- 
self from the Indus to the Atlantic and Spain, and from Kash- 
gar on the borders of China to Upper Egypt. Two maps must 
suffice to show the limits to which the vigorous impulse of the 
new faith carried the Arab idea and the Arabic scriptures, before 
worldliness, the old trading and plundering spirit, and the 
glamour of the silk robe had completely recovered their paralyz- 
ing sway over the Arab intelligence and will. The reader 
will note how the great tide swept over the footsteps of Yuan 
Chwang, and how easily in Africa the easy conquests of the 

^At Ctesiphon. 

* Paraphrased from Schurtz in Helmolt's History of the World. 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 589 

Vandals were repeated in the reverse direction. And if the 
reader entertains any dekisions about a fine civilization, either 
Persian, Koman, Hellenic, or Egyptian, being submerged by 
this flood, the sooner he dismisses such ideas the better, Islam 
prevailed because it was the best social and political order the 
times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found 
politically apathetic peoples, robbed, oppressed, bullied, uned- 
ucated, and unorganized, and it found selfish and unsound gov- 
ernments out of touch with any people at all. It was the broad- 
est, freshest, and cleanest political idea that had yet come into 
actual activity in the world, and it offered better terms than 
any other to the mass of mankind. The capitalistic and slave- 
holding system of the Eoman Empire and the literature and 
culture and social tradition of Europe had altogether decayed 
and broken down before Islam arose; it was only when man- 
kind lost faith in the sincerity of its representatives that Islam, 
too, began to decay. 

The larger part of its energy spent itself in conquering 
and assimilating Persia and Turkestan; its most vigorous 
thrusts were northwardly from Persia and westwardly through 
Egypt. Had it concentrated its first vigour upon the Byzantine 
Empire, there can be little doubt that by the eighth century 
it would have taken Constantinople and come through into 
Europe as easily as it reached the Pamirs. The Caliph Mua- 
wiya, it is true, besieged the capital for seven years (672 to 678), 
and Suleiman in 717 and 718; but the pressure was not sus- 
tained, and for three or four centuries longer the Byzantine 
Empire remained the crazy bulwark of Europe. In the newly 
Christianized or still pagan Avars, Bulgars, Serbs, Slavs, and 
Saxons, Islam would certainly have found as ready converts as 
it did in the Turks of Central Asia. And though, instead 
of insisting upon Constantinople, it first came round into Eu- 
rope by the circuitous route of Africa and Spain, it was only 
in France, at the end of a vast line of communications from 
Arabia, that it encountered a power sufficiently vigorous to 
arrest its advance. 

From the outset the Bedouin aristocrats of Mecca dominated 
the new empire. Abu Bekr, the first Caliph, was in an informal 
shouting way elected at Medina, and so were Omar I and 0th- 
man, the third Caliph, but all three were Meccans of good 
family. They were not men of Medina. And though Abu 



590 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 591 

Bekr and Omar wore men of stark simplicity and righteousness 
Otliman was of a baser quality, a man quite in the vein of 
those silk robes, to whom conquest was not conquest for Allah 
but for Arabia, and especially for Mecca in Arabia, and more 
particularly for himself and for the Meccans and for his fam- 
ily, the Omayyads. He was a worthy man, who stood out 
for his country and his town and his '^people." He was no 
early convert as his two predecessors had been; he had joined 
the Prophet for reasons of policy in fair give and take. With 
his accession the Caliph ceases to be a strange man of fire and 
wonder, and becomes an Oriental monarch like many Oriental 
monarchs before and since, a fairly good monarch by Eastern 
standards as yet, but nothing more. 

The rule and death of Othman brought out the consequences 
of Muhammad's weaknesses as clearly as the lives of Abu Bekr 
and Omar had witnessed to the divine fire in his teaching. Mu- 
hammad had been politic at times when Abu Bekr would have 
been firm, and the new element of aristocratic greediness that 
came in with Othman w\as one fruit of those politic moments. 
And the legacy of that Carelessly compiled harem of the Prophet, 
the family complications and jealousies which had lurked in 
the background of Moslem affairs during the rule of the first 
two Caliphs, was now coming out into the light of day. Ali, 
who was the nephew, the adopted son, and the son-in-law of 
the Prophet^he was the husband of the Prophet's daughter 
Fatima — he had considered himself the rightful Caliph. His 
claims formed an undertow to the resentment of Medina and of 
the rival families of Mecca against the advancement of the 
Omayyads. But Ayesha, the favourite wafe of the Prophet, had 
always been jealous of Fatima and hostile to Ali. She sup- 
ported Othman. . . . The splendid opening of the story of 
Islam collapses suddenly into this squalid dispute and bickering 
of heirs and widows. 

In 656 Othman, an old man of eighty, was stoned in the 
streets of Medina by a mob, chased to his house, and murdered ; 
and Ali became at last Caliph, only to be murdered in his turn 
(661). In one of the battles in this civil war, Ayesha, now a 
gallant, mischievous old lady, distinguished herself by leading 
a charge, mounted on a camel. She was taken prisoner and 
treated well. 

While the armies of Islam were advancing triumphantly to 



592 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the conquest of the world, this sickness of civil war smote at its 
head. What was the rule of Allah in the world to Ayesha 
when she could score off the detested Fatima, and what' heed 
were the Omayyads and the partisans of Ali likely to take of 
the unity of mankind when they had a good hot feud of this 
sort to entertain them, with the caliphate as a prize? The world 
of Islam was rent in twain by the spites, greeds, and partisan 
silliness of a handful of men and women in Medina. That 
quarrel still lives. To this day one main division of the Mos- 
lems, the Shiites, maintain the hereditary right of Ali to be 
Caliph as an article of faith! They prevail in Persia and 
India. But an equally important section, the Sunnites, with 
whom it is difficult for a disinterested observer not to agree, 
deny this peculiar addendum to Muhammad's simple creed. 
So far as we can gather at this length of time, Ali was an 
entirely commonplace individual. 

To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of 
Islam is like watching a case of softening of the brain. To 
the copious literature of the subject we must refer the reader 
who wishes to learn how Hasan^ the son of Ali, was poisoned 
by his wife, and how Husein, his brother, was killed. We do 
but name them here because they still afford a large section of 
mankind scope for sentimental partisanship and mutual an- 
noyance. They are the two chief Shiite martyrs. Amidst the 
coming and going of their conflicts the old Kaaba at Mecca 
was burnt down, and naturally there began endless disputa- 
tion whether it should be rebuilt in exactly its ancient form or 
on a much larger scale. 

In this and the preceding sections we have seen once more 
the inevitable struggle of this newest and latest unifying im- 
pulse in the world's affairs against the everyday worldliness 
of mankind, and we have seen also how from the first the com- 
plicated household of Muhammad was like an evil legacy to 
the new faith. But as this history now degenerates into the 
normal crimes and intrigues of an Oriental dynasty, the stu- 
dent of history will realize a third fundamental weakness in 
the world reforms of Muhammad. He was an illiterate Arab, 
ignorant of history, totally ignorant of all the political experi- 
ences of Rome and Greece, and almost as ignorant of the real 
history of Judea ; and he left his followers with no scheme for 
a stable government embodying and concentrating the general 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 593 

will of the faithful, and no effective form to express the very 
real spirit of democracy (using the world in its modern sense) 
that pervades the essential teaching of Islam. His own rule 
was unlimited autocracy, and autocratic Islam has remained. 
Politically Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from 
the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert. 
The breach of the pilgrims' tiTice that led to the battle of Badr 
is the blackest mark against early Islam. Nominally Allah 
is its chief ruler — but practically its master has always been 
whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough to snatch 
and hold the Caliphate — and, subject to revolts and assassina- 
tions, its final law has been that man's will. 

For a time, after the death of Ali, the Omayyad family was 
in the ascendant, and for nearly a century they gave rulers 
to Islam. 

The Arab historians are so occupied with the dynastic squab- 
bles and crimes of the time, that it is difficult to trace the ex- 
ternal history of the period. We find Moslem shipping upon 
the seas defeating the Byzantine fleet in a great sea fight off 
the coast of Lycia (a.d. 655), but how the Moslems acquired 
this victorious fleet thus early we do not clearly know. It 
was probably chiefly Egyptian. For some years Islam cer- 
tainly controlled the eastern Mediterranean, and in 662 and 
again in 672, during the reign of Muawiya (662-680), the 
first great Omayyad Caliph, made two sea attacks upon Con- 
stantinople. They had to be sea attacks because Islam, so long- 
as it was under Arab rule, never surmounted the barrier of the 
Taurus Mountains. During the same period the Moslems were 
also pressing their conquests further and further into Cen- 
tral Asia. While Islam was already decaying at its centre, 
it was yet making great hosts of new adherents and awaken- 
ing a new spirit among the hitherto divided and aimless 
Turkish peoples. Medina was no longer a possible centre for 
its vast enterprises in Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, 
and so Damascus became the usual capital of the Omayyad 
Caliphs. 

Chief among these, as for a time the clouds of dynastic in- 
trigue clear, are Abdal Malik (685-705) and Walid I (705- 
715), under whom the Omayyad line rose to the climax of its 
successes. The western boundary was carried to the Pyrenees, 
while to the east the domains of the Caliph marched with China. 



594. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The son of "Walid, Suleiman (715), carried out a second series 
of Moslem attacks upon Constantinople which his father had 
planned and proposed. As with the Caliph Muawiya half a 
century before, the approach was by sea — for Asia Minor, as 
we have just noted, was still unconquered — and the shipping 
w^as drawn chiefly from Eg\'pt. The emperor, a usurper, Leo 
the Isaurian, displayed extraordinary skill and obstinacy in 
the defence ; he burnt most of the Moslem shipping in a bril- 
liant sortie, cut up the troops they had landed upon the Asiatic 
side of the Bosphorus, and after a campaign in Europe of 
two years (717-718), a winter of unexampled severity com- 
pleted their defeat. 

From this point onward the glory of the Omayyad line de- 
cays. The first tremendous impulse of Islam was now spent. 
There was no further expansion and a manifest decline in 
religious zeal. Islam had made millions of converts, and had 
digested those millions very imperfectly. Cities, nations, whole 
sects and races, Arab pagans, Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, 
Zoroastrians, Turanian pagans had been swallowed up into this 
new vast empire of Muhammad's successors. It has hitherto 
been the common characteristic of all the great unifying re- 
ligious initiators of the world, the common oversight, that 
they have accepted the moral and theological ideals 
to which the first appeal was made, as though they were 
universal ideals. Muhammad's appeal, for example,- was to 
the traditional chivalry and underlying monotheistic feelings 
of the intelligent Arabs of his time. These things were latent 
in the mind and conscience of Mecca and Medina ; he did but 
call them forth. Then, as the new teaching spread and stereo- 
typed itself, it had to work on a continually more uncongenial 
basis, it had to grow in soil that distorted and perverted it. 
Its sole text-book was the Koran. To minds untuned to the 
melodies of Arabic, this book seemed to be, as it seems to many 
European minds to-day, a mixture of fine-spirited rhetoric 
with — to put it plainly — formless and unintelligent gabble. 
Countless converts missed the real thing in it altogether. To 
that we must ascribe the readiness of the Persian and Indian 
sections of the faith to join the Shiite schism upon a quarrel that 
they could at least understand and feel. And to the same at- 
tempt to square the new stuif with old prepossessions was due 
such extravagant theology as presently disputed whether the 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 595 

Koran was and always had been co-existent with God.^ We 
should be stupefied by the preposterousness of this idea if we 
did not recognize in it at once the well-meaning attempt of 
some learned Christian convert to Islamize his belief that "In 
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and 
the Word was God." 2 

None of the great unifying religious initiators of the world 
hitherto seems to have been accompanied by any understanding 
of the vast educational task, the vast work of lucid and varied 
exposition and intellectual organization involved in its propo- 
sitions. They all present the same history of a rapid spread- 
ing, like a little water poured over a great area, and then of a 
superficiality and corruption. 

In a little while we hear stories of an Omayyad Caliph, 
Walid II (743-74-1), who mocked at the Koran, ate pork, drank 
wine, and did not pray. Those stories may have been true or 
they may have been circulated for political reasons. There 
began a puritan reaction in Mecca and Medina against the 
levity and luxury of Damascus. Another great Arab family, 
the Abbas family, the Abbasids, a thoroughly wicked line, had 
long been scheming for power, and was making capital out of 
the general discontent. The feud of the Omayyads and the 
Abbasids was older than Islam ; it had been going on before 
Muhammad was born. These Abbasids took up the tradition 
of the Shiite "martyrs," Ali and his sons Hasan and Husein, 
and identified themselves with it. The banner of the Omay- 
yads was white ; the Abbasid adopted a black banner, black in 
mourning for Hasan and Husein, black because black is more 
impressive than any colour; moreover, the Abbasids declared 
that all the Caliphs after Ali were usurpers. In 749 they 
accomplished a carefully prepared revolution, and the last of 
the Omayyad Caliphs was hunted down and slain in Egypt. 
Abul Abbas was the first of the Abbasid Caliphs, and he began 
his reign by collecting into one prison every living male of 
the Omayyad line upon whom he could lay hands and causing 
them all to be massacred. Their bodies, it is said, were heaped 
together, a leathern carpet was spread over them, and on this 
gruesome table Abul Abbas and his councillors feasted. More- 
over, the tombs of the Omayyad Caliphs were rifled, and their 
bones burnt and scattered to the four winds of heaven. So the 
'Mark Sykes. 'St. John's Gospel, chap. i. 1. 



596 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

grievances of Ali were avenged at last, and the Omayyad line 
passed out of history. 

There was, it is interesting to note, a rising on behalf of the 
Omayyads in Khorasan which was assisted by the Chinese 
Emperor. 

§ v 

But the descendants of Ali were not destined to share in 
this triumph for long. The Abassids were adventurers and 
rulers of an older school than Islam. Now that the tradition 
of Ali had served its poirpose, the next proceeding of the new 
Caliph was to hunt down and slaughter the surviving members 
of his family, the descendants of Ali and Fatima. 

Clearly the old traditions of Sassanid Persia and of Persia 
before the Greeks were returning to the world. With the 
accession of the Abbasids the control of the sea departed from 
the Caliph, and with it went Spain and North Africa, in 
which, under an Omayyad survivor in the former case, inde- 
pendent INfoslem states now arose. The centre of gravity of 
Islam shifted across the desert from Damascus to Mesopotamia. 
Mansur, the successor of Abul Abbas, built himself a new cap- 
ital at Bagdad near the ruins of Ctesiphon, the former Sassanid 
capital. Turks and Persians as well as Arabs became Emirs, 
and the army was reorganized upon Sassanid lines. Medina 
and Mecca were now only of importance as pilgrimage cen- 
tres, to which the faithful turned to pray. But because it was 
a fine language, and because it was the language of the Koran, 
Arabic continued to spread until presently it had replaced 
Greek and become the language of educated men throughout 
the whole Moslem world. 

Of the Abbasid monarchs after Abul Abbas we need tell 
little here. A bickering war went on year by year in Asia 
Minor in which neither Byzantium nor Bagdad made any per- 
manent gains, though once or twice the Moslems raided as far 
as the Bosphorus. A false prophet Mokanna, who said he was 
God, had a brief but troublesome career. There were plots, 
there were insurrections ; they lie flat and colourless now in the 
histories like dead flowers in an old book. One other Abbasid 
Caliph only need be named, and that quite as much for his 
legendary as for his real importance, Haroun-al-Easchid (786- 
809). He was not only the Caliph of an outwardly prosper- 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 597 

ous empire in the world of reality, but he was also the Caliph 
of an undying empire in the deathless world of fiction, he was 
the Haroun-al-Raschid of the Arabian Nights. 

Sir Mark Sykes ^ gives an account of the reality of his em- 
pire from which we will quote certain passages. He says : "The 
Imperial Court was polished, luxurious, and unlimitedly 
wealthy; the capital, Bagdad, a gigantic mercantile city sur- 
rounding a huge administrative fortress, wherein every de- 
partment of state had a properly regulated and well-ordered 
public office; where schools and colleges abounded; whither phi- 
losophers, students, doctors, poets^ and theologians flocked frcm 
all parts of the civilized globe. . . . The provincial capitals 
were embellished with vast public buildings, and linked to- 
gether by an effective and rapid service of posts and caravans; 
the frontiers were secure and well garrisoned, the army loyal, 
efficient, and brave; the governors and ministers honest and 
forbearing. The empire stretched with equal strength and 
unimpaired control from the Cilician gates to Aden, and from 
Egypt to Central Asia. Christians, Pagans, Jews, as well as 
Moslems, were employed in the government service. Usurpers, 
rebellious generals, and false prophets seemed to have vanished 
from the Moslem dominions. Traffic and wealth had taken 
the place of revolution and famine. . . . Pestilence and dis- 
ease were met by Imperial hospitals and government physi- 
cians. ... In government business the rough-and-ready meth- 
ods of Arabian administration had given place to a complicated 
system of Divans, initiated partly from the Roman, but chiefly 
taken from the Persian system of government. Posts, Finance, 
Privy Seal, Crown Lands, Justice, and Military affairs were 
each administered by separate bureaux in the hands of min- 
isters and officials; an army of clerks, scribes, writers, and ac- 
countants swarmed into these offices and gradually swept the 
whole power of the government into their own hands by sepa- 
rating the Commander of the Faithful from any direct inter- 
course with his subjects. The Imperial Palace and the entour- 
age were equally based on Roman and Persian precedents. 
Eunuchs, closely veiled 'harems' of women, guards, spies, go- 
betweens, jesters, poets, and dwarfs clustered around the person 
of the Commander of the Faithful, each, in his degree, endeav- 
ouring to gain the royal favour and indirectly distracting the 
^ The Caliph's Last Heritage. 



598 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

royal mind from affairs of business and state. Meanwhile the 
mercantile trade of the East poured gold into Bagdad, and sup- 
plemented the other enonnous stream of money derived from 
the contributions of plunder and loot despatched to the capital 
by the commanders of the victorious raiding forces which har- 
ried Asia Minor, India, and Turkestan. The seemingly unend- 
ing supply of Turkish slaves and Byzantine specie added to the 
richness of the revenues of Irak, and, combined with the vast 
commercial traffic of which Bagdad was the centre, produced 
a large and powerful moneyed class, composed of the sons of 
generals, officials, landed proprietors, royal favourites, mer- 
chants, and the like, who encouraged the arts, literature, phi- 
losophy, and poetry as the mood took them, building palaces 
for themselves, vying with each other in the luxury of their 
entertainments, suborning poets to sound their praises, dabbling 
in philosophy, supporting various schools of thought, endowing 
charities, and, in fact, behaving as the wealthy have always 
behaved in all ages. 

"I have said that the Aboasid Empire in the days of Haroun- 
al-Easchid was weak and feeble to a degree^ and perhaps the 
reader will consider this a foolish proposition when he takes 
into consideration that I have described the Empire as orderly, 
the administration definite and settled, the army efficient, and 
wealth abundant. The reason I make the suggestion is that the 
Abbasid Empire had lost touch with everything original and 
vital in Islam, and was constructed entirely by the reunion of 
the fragments of the empires Islam had destroyed. There was 
nothing in the empire which appealed to the higher instincts 
of the leaders of the people ; the holy war had degenerated into 
a systematic acquisition of plunder. The Caliph had become 
a luxurious Emperor or King of Kings; the administration 
had changed from a patriarchal system to a bureaucracy. The 
wealthier classes were rapidly losing all faith in the religion 
of the state; speculative philosophy and high living were tak- 
ing the place of Koranic orthodoxy and Arabian simplicity. 
The solitary bond which could have held the empire together, 
the sternness and plainness of the Moslem faith, was com- 
pletely neglected by both the Caliph and his advisers. . . . 
Haroun-al-Raschid himself was a winebibber, and his palace was 
decorated with gi'aven images of birds and beasts and men. . . . 

"For a moment we stand amazed at the greatness of the Ab- 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 599 

basid aominibn; then suddenly we realize that it is but as a 
fair husk enclosing the dust and ashes of dead civilizations." 

Haroun-al-Raschid died in 809. At his death his "reat em- 
pire fell immediately into civil war and confusion, and the next 
great event of unusual importance in this region of the world 
comes two hundred years later when the Turks, under the chiefs 
of the great family of the Seljuks, poured southward out of 
Turkestan, and not only conquered the empire of Bagdad, but 
Asia Minor also. Coming from the north-east as they did, 
they were able to outflank the great barrier of the Taurus 
Mountains, which had hitherto held back the Moslems. They 
were still much the same people as those of whom Yuan Chwang 
gave us a glimpse four hundred years earlier, but now they were 
Moslems, and Moslems of the primitive type, nien whom Abu 
Bekr would have welcomed to Islam. They caused a great 
revival of vigour in Islam, and they turned the minds of the 
Moslem world once more in the direction of a religious war 
against Christendom. For there had been a sort of truce be- 
tween these two gi-eat religions after the cessation of the Mos- 
lem advance and the decline of the Omayyads. Such war- 
fare as had gone on between Christianity and Islam had been 
rather border-bickering than sustained war. It became only 
a bitter fanatical struggle again in the eleventh century. 

§ 8 

But before we go on to tell of the Turks and the Crusaders, 
the great wars that began between Christendom and Islam, 
and which have left a quite insane intolerance between these 
great systems right down to the present time, it is necessary 
to give a little more attention to the intellectual life of the 
Arabic-speaking world which was now spreading more and 
more widely over the regions which Hellenism had once dom- 
inated. For some generations before Muhammad, the Arab 
mind had been, as it were, smouldering, it had been producing 
poetry and much religious discussion ; under the stimulus of 
the national and racial successes it presently blazed out with a 
brilliance second only to that of the Greeks during their best 
period. From a new angle and with a fresh vigour it took up 
that systematic development of positive knowledge which the 
Greeks had begim and relinquished. It revived the human 



600 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

pursuit of science. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab 
was the foster-father of the scientific method of dealing with 
reality, that is to say, by absolute frankness, the utmost sim- 
plicity of statement and explanation, exact record, and ex- 
haustive criticism. Through the Arabs it was and not by the 
Latin route that the modern world received that gift of light 
and power. 

Their conquests brought the Arabs into contact with the 
Greek literary tradition, not at first directly, but through the 
Syrian translations of the Greek writers. The Nestorian Chris- 
tians, the Christians to the east of orthodoxy, seem to have 
been much more intelligent and active-minded than the court 
theologians of Byzantium, and at a much higher level of gen- 
eral education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the west. 
They had been tolerated during the latter days of the Sassanids, 
and they were tolerated by Islam until the ascendancy of the 
Turks in the eleventh century. They had preserved much of 
the Hellenic medical science, and had even added to it. In 
the Omayyad times most of the physicians in the Caliph's 
dominions were Nestorians, and no doubt many learned Nesto- 
rians professed Islam without any serious compunction or any 
great change in their work and thoughts. They had preserved 
much of Aristotle both in Greek and in Syrian translations. 
They had a considerable mathematical literature. Their equip- 
ment makes the contemporary resources of St. Benedict or 
Cassiodorus seem very pitiful. To these Nestorian teachers 
came the fresh Arab mind out of the desert, keen and curious, 
and learnt much and improved upon its teaching. 

But the Nestor ians were not the only teachers available for 
the Arabs. Throughout all the rich cities of the east the kindred 
Jews were scattered with their own distinctive literature and 
tradition, and the Arab and the Jewish mind reacted upon one 
another to a common benefit. The Arab was infoiTned and 
the Jew sharpened to a keener edge. The Jews have never been 
pedants in the matter of their language; we have already 
noted that a thousand years before Islam they spoke Greek 
in Hellenized Alexandria, and now all over this new Moslem 
world they were speaking and writing Arabic. Some of the 
greatest of Jewish literature was written in Arabic, the re- 
ligious writings of Maimonides, for example. Indeed, it is 
difficult to say in the case of this Arabic culture where the Jew 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 601 

ends and the Arab begins, so important and essential were 
its Jewish factors. 

Moreover, there was a third source of inspiration, more 
particularly in mathematical science, to which at present it is 
difficult to do justice — India. There can be little doubt that 
the Arab mind during its best period was in effective contact 
with Sanscrit literature and with Indian ideas, and that it 
derived much from this source. 

The distinctive activities of the Arab mind were already 
manifest under the Omayyads, though it was during the Al- 
basid time that it made its best display. History is the be- 
ginning and core of all sound philosophy and all great literature, 
and the first Arab writers of distinction were historians, biogra- 
phers, and quasi-historical poets. Romantic fiction and the 
short story followed as a reading public developed, willing to 
be amused. And as reading ceased to be a special accomplish- 
ment, and became necessary to every man of affairs and to every 
youth of breeding, came the systematic growth of an educa- 
tional system and an educational literature. By the ninth and 
tenth centuries there are not only grammars, but great lexi- 
cons, and a mass of philological learning in Islam. 

And a century or so in advance of the west, there grew up 
in the Moslem world at a number of centres, at Basra, at Kufa, 
at Bagdad and Cairo, and at Cordoba, out of what were at first 
religious schools dependent upon mosques, a series of great 
universities. The light of these universities shone far beyond 
the Moslem world, and drew students to them from east and 
west. At Cordoba in particular there were great numbers of 
Christian students, and the influence of Arab philosophy com- 
ing by way of Spain upon the universities of Paris, Oxford, and 
North Italy and upon Western European thought generally, was 
very considerable indeed. The name of Averroes (Ibn-rushd) 
of Cordoba (1126-1198) stands out as that of the culminating 
influence of Arab philosophy upon European thought. He 
developed the teachings of Aristotle upon lines that made a 
sharp division between religious and scientific truth, and so 
prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from 
the theological dogmatism that restrained it both under Chris- 
tianity and under Islam. Another great name is that of Avi- 
cenna (Ibnsina), the Prince of Physicians (980-1037), who 
was born at the other end of the Arabic world at Bokhara, 



602 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and who travelled in Khorasan. . . . The book-copying indus- 
try flourished at Alexandria, Damascus, Cairo, and Bagdad, 
and about the year 970 there were twenty-seven free schools 
open in Cordoba for the education of the poor. 

''In mathematics," say Thatcher and Schwill,^ "the Arabs 
built on the foundations of the Greek mathematicians. The 
origin of the so-called Arabic numerals is obscure. Under 
Theodoric the Great, Boethius made use of certain signs which 
were in part very like the nine digits which we now use. One 
of the pupils of Gerbert also used signs which were still more 
like ours, but the zero was unknown till the twelfth century, 
when it was. invented by an Arab mathematician named Mu- 
hammad-Ibn-Musa, who also was the first to use the decimal 
notation, and w'ho gave the digits the value of position. In 
geometry the Arabs did not add much to Euclid, but algebra is 
practically their creation ; also they developed spherical trigon- 
ometry, inventing the sine, tangent, and cotangent. In physics 
they invented the pendulum, and produced work on optics. 
They made progress in the science of astronomy. They built 
several observatories, and constructed many astronomical in- 
struments which are still in use. They calculated the angle 
of the ecliptic and the precession of the equinoxes. Their 
knowledge of astronomy was undoubtedly considerable. 

"In medicine they made great advances over the work of 
the Greeks. They studied physiology and hygiene, and their 
materia medica was practically the same as ours to-day. Many 
of their methods of treatment are still in use among us. Their 
surgeons understood the use of ansesthetics, and performed 
some of the most difficult operations known. At the time when 
in Europe the practice of medicine was forbidden by the Church, 
which expected cures to be effected by religious rites per- 
formed by the clergy, the Arabs had a real science of medicine. 
In chemistry they made a good beginning. They discovered 
many new substances, such as alcohol,^ potash, nitrate of silver, 
corrosive sublimate, and nitric and sulphuric acid, ... In 
manufactures they outdid the world in variety and beauty of 
design and perfection of workmanship. They worked in all the 

*A General History of Europe. 

* Alcohol as "spirits of wine" was known to Pliny (100 A.D.). The 
student of the history of science should consult Campbell Brown's History 
of Chemistry and check these statements in the text. 



J 



MUHAMMAD AND ISLAM 603 

metals — gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. In textile 
fabrics they have never been surpassed. They made glass and 
pottery of the finest qnality. They knev7 the secrets of dyeing, 
and they manufactured paper. They had many processes of 
dressing leather, and their work v^^as famous throughout Eu- 
rope. They made tinctures, essences, and syrups. They made 
sugar from the cane, and grew many fine kinds of wine. They 
practised farming in a scientific way, and had good systems of ir- 
rigation. They knew the value of fertilizers, and adapted their 
crops to the quality of the ground. They excelled in horti- 
culture, knowing how to graft and how to produce new varieties 
of fruit and flowers. They introduced into the west many 
trees and plants from the east, and wrote scientific treatises on 
farming." 

One item in this account must be underlined here because of 
its importance in the intellectual life of mankind, the manufac- 
ture of paper. This the Arabs seem to have learnt from the 
Chinese by way of Central Asia. The Europeans acquired it 
from the Arabs. Until that time books had to be written upon 
parchment or papyrus, and after the Arab conquest of Egypt 
Europe was cut ofi^ from the papyrus supply. Until paper 
became abundant, the art of printing was of little use, and 
newspapers and popular education by means of books was im- 
possible. This was probably a much more im.portant factor in 
the relative backwardness of Europe during the dark ages 
than historians seem disposed to admit. . . . 

And all this mental life went on in the Moslem world in 
spite of a very considerable amount of political disorder. From 
first to last the Arabs never grappled with the problem, the still 
unsolved problem, of the stable progressive state; everywhere 
their form of government was absolutist and subject to the con- 
vulsions, changes, intrigues, and murders that have always 
characterized the extremer forms of monarchy. But for some 
centuries, beneath the crimes and rivalries of courts and camps, 
the spirit of Islam did preserve a certain general decency and 
restraint in life ; the Byzantine Empire was impotent to shat- 
ter this civilization, and the Turkish danger in the north-east 
gathered strength only very slowly. Until the Turk fell upon 
it, the intellectual life of Islam continued. Perhaps it secretly 
flattered itself that it would always be able to go on in spite 
of the thread of violence and unreason in its political direction. 



604 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Hitherto in all countries that has been the characteristic atti- 
tude of science and literature. The intellectual man has been 
loth to come to grips with the forcible man. He has generally 
been something of a courtier and time-server. Possibly he has 
never yet been quite sure of himself. Hitherto men of reason 
and knowledge have never had the assurance and courage of the 
religious fanatic. But there can be little doubt that they have 
accumulated settled convictions and gathered confidence dur- 
ing the last few centuries ; they have slowly found a means to 
power through the development of popular education and pop- 
ular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say 
things plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organiza- 
tion of human affairs than they have ever been before in the 
world's history. 



XXXII 

CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 

1. The Western World at Us Lowest Ebb. § 2. The Feudal 
System. § 3. The Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians. 
§ 4. The Christianization of the Western Barbarians. § 5. 
Charlemagne becomes Emperor of the West. § 6. The Per- 
sonalitij of Charlemagne. § 7. The French and the Germans 
become Distinct. § 8. The Normans, the Saracens, the 
Hungarians and the Seljuk Turks. § 9. How Constanti- 
nople Appealed to Borne. § 10. The Crusades. § 11. The 
Crusades a Test of Cliridianity. % 12. The Emperor Fred- 
erick II. § 13. Defects and Limitations of the Papacy. 
§ 14. A List of Leading Popes. 



LET us turn again now from this intellectual renascence 
in the cradle of the ancient civilizations to the affairs 
of the Western world. We have described the complete 
economic, social, and political break-up of the Roman imperial 
system in the west, the confusion and darkness that followed in 
the sixth and seventh centuries, and the struggles of such men 
as Cassiodorus to keep alight the flame of human learning amidst 
these windy confusions. For a time it would be idle to write 
of states and rulers. Smaller or greater adventurers seized 
a castle or a countryside and ruled an uncertain area. The 
British Islands, for instance, were split up amidst a multitude 
of rulers; numerous Keltic chiefs in Ireland and Scotland 
and Wales and Cornwall fought and prevailed over and suc- 
cumbed to each other; the English invaders were also divided 
into a number of fluctuating "kingdoms," Kent, Wessex, Essex, 
Sussex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia, which were 
constantly at war with one another. So it was over most of 
the Western world. Here a bishop would be the monarch, as 
Gregory the Great was in Rome; here a town or a group of 

605 



606 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

towns would be under the rule of the duke or prince of this or 
that. Amidst the vast ruins of the city of Rome half-inde- 
pendent families of quasi-noble adventurers and their retainers 
maintained themselves. The Pope kept a sort of general pre- 
dominance there, but he was sometimes more than balanced by a 
"Duke of Rome." The great arena of the Colosseum had been 
made into a privately-owned castle, and so, too, had the vast cir- 
cular tomb of the Emperor Hadrian ; and the adventurers who 
had possession of these strongholds and their partisans waylaid 
each other and fought and bickered in the ruinous streets of 
the once imperial city. The tomb of Hadrian was known after 
the days of Gregory the Great as the Castle of St. Angelo, 
the Castle of the Holy Angel, because when he was crossing 
the bridge over the Tiber on his way to St. Peter's to pray 
against the great pestilence which w^as devastating the city, he 
had had a vision of a great angel standing over the dark mass of 
the mausoleum and sheathing a sword, and he had known then 
that his prayers would be answered. This Castle of St. Angelo 
played a very important part in Roman affairs during this 
age of disorder. 

Spain was in much the same state of political fragmentation 
as Italy or France or Britain; and in Spain the old feud of 
Carthaginian and Roman was still continued in the bitter 
hostility of their descendants and heirs, the Jew and the Chris- 
tian. So that when the power of the Caliph had swept along 
the ISTorth African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, it found 
in the Spanish Jews ready helpers in its invasion of Europe. 
A Moslem army of Arabs and of Berbers, the nomadic Hamitic 
people of the African desert and mountain hinterland who had 
Ijeen converted to Islam, crossed and defeated the West Goths 
in a great battle in 711. In a few years the whole country 
was in their possession. 

In 720 Islam had reached the Pyrenees, and had pushed 
round their eastern end into France ; and for a time it seemed 
that the faith was likely to subjugate Gaul as easily as it had 
subjugated the Spanish peninsula. But presently it struck 
against something hard, a new kingdom of the Franks, which 
had been consolidating itself for some two centuries in the 
Rhineland and North France. 

Of this Frankish kingdom, the precursor of France and Ger- 
many, which formed the western bulwark of Europe against 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 607 

the faith of Muhammad, as the Byzantine empire behind the 
Taurus Mountains fonned the eastern, we shall now havo 
much to tell ; but first we must give some account of the new 
system of social groupings out of which it arose. 



It is necessary that the reader should have a definite idea 
of the social condition of western Europe in the eighth cen- 
tury. It was not a barbarism. Eastern Europe was still bar- 
baric and savage; things had progressed but little beyond the 
state of affairs described by Gibbon in his account of the mission 
of Priscus to Attila (see p. 485). But western Europe was 
a shattered civilization, without law, without administration, 
with roads destroyed and education disorganized, but still with 
gi'eat numbers of people with civilized ideas and habits and 
traditions. It was a time of confusion, of brigandage, of 
crimes unpunished and universal insecurity. It is very inter- 
esting to trace how, out of the universal melee, the beginnings 
of a new order appeared. In a modern breakdown there would 
probably be the formation of local vigilance societies, which 
would combine and restore a police administration and a roughly 
democratic rule. But in the broken-down western empire of 
the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, men's ideas turned 
rather to leaders than to committees, and the centres about 
which affairs crystallized were here barbaric chiefs, here a 
vigorous bishop or some surviving claimant to a Eoman official 
position, here a long-recogiiized landowner or man of ancient 
family, and here again some vigorous usurper of power. No 
solitary man was safe. So men were forced to link themselves 
with others, preferably people stronger than themselves. The 
lonely man chose the most powerful and active person in his 
district and became his man. The freeman or the weak lordling 
of a petty territory linked himself to some more powerful lord. 
The protection of that lord (or the danger of his hostility) be- 
came more considerable with every such accession. So very 
rapidly there went on a process of political crystallization in 
the confused and lawless sea into which the Western Empire 
had liquefied. These natural associations and alliances of 
protector and subordinates grew very rapidly into a system, 
the feudal system, traces of which are still to be found in 



608 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the social stinicture of every Eiiroj>ean community west of 
Russia. 

This process speedily took on technical forms and laws of its 
own. In such a country as Gaul it was already well in progress 
in the days of insecurity before the barbarian tribes broke into 
the empire as conquerors. The Franks when they came into 
Gaul brought with them an institution, which we have already 
noted in the case of the Macedonians, and which was probably 
of very wide distribution among the Nordic people, the gather- 
ing about the chief or war king of a body of young men of 
good family, the companions or comitatus, his counts or cap- 
tains. It was natural in the case of invading peoples that the 
relations of a weak lord to a strong lord should take on the 
relations of a count to his king, and that a conquering chief 
should divide seized and confiscated estates among his com- 
panions. From the side of the decaying empire there came to 
feudalism the idea of the grouping for mutual protection of men 
and estates ; from the Teutonic side came the notions of knightly 
association, devotion, and personal service. The former was 
the economic side of the institution, the latter the chivalrous. 

The analogy of the aggregation of feudal groupings with crys- 
tallization is a very close one. As the historian watches the 
whirling and eddying confusion of the fourth and fifth cen- 
turies in Western Europe, he begins to perceive the appearance 
of these pyramidal growths of heads and subordinates and 
sub-subordinates, which jostle against one another, branch, 
dissolve again, or coalesce. "We use the term 'feudal system' 
for convenience sake, but with a degree of impropriety if it 
conveys the meaning 'systematic' Feudalism in its most flour- 
ishing age was anything but systematic. It was confusion 
roughly organized. Great diversity prevailed everywhere, and 
we should not be surprised to find some different fact or custom 
in every lordship. Anglo-Norman feudalism attained in the 
eleventh and twelfth centuries a logical completeness and a 
uniformity of practice which, in the feudal age proper, can 
hardly be found elsewhere through so large a territory. . . . 

"The foundation of the feudal relationship proper was the fief, 
which was usually land, but might be any desirable thing, as 
an office, a revenue in money or kind, the right to collect a 
toll, or operate a mill. In return for the fief, the man became 
the vassal of his lord ; he knelt before him, and, with his hands 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



609 



between his lord's hands, promised him fealty and service. . . . 
The faithful performance of all the duties he had assumed in 
homage constituted the vassal's right and title to his fief. So 
long as they were fulfilled, he, and his heir after him, held the 
fief as his property, practically and in relation to all under- 
tenants as if he were the owner. In the ceremony of homage 



'A 'A -fi, "MapofElXROFEahouirSOOAJ). Jfi « 




VV--ii*iliil|^ 



V« B A. 



and investiture, which is the creative contract of feudalism, 
the obligations assumed by the two parties were, as a rule, not 
specified in exact terms. They were determined by local cus- 
tom. ... In many points of detail the vassal's services dif- 
fered widely in different parts of the feudal world. We may 
say, however, that they fall into two classes, general and specific. 
The general included all that might come under the idea of 
loyalty, seeking the lord's interests, keeping his secrets, be- 
traying the plans of his enemies, protecting his family, etc. 
The specific services are capable of more definite statement, 



610 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and they usually received exact defmitioii in custom and some' 
times in written documents. The most characteristic of these 
was the military service, which included appearance in the 
field on summons with a certain force, often armed in a speci- 
fied way, and remaining a specified length of time. It often 
included also the duty of g-uarding the lord's castle, and of 
holding one's own castle subject to the plans of the lord for the 
defence of his fief. . . . 

"Theoretically regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a 
network of these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the 
other from the smallest, the knight's fee, at the bottom, to the 
king at the top, who was the supreme landowner, or who held 
the kingdom from God. . . ." ^ 

But this was the theory that was superimposed upon the 
established facts. The reality of feudalism was its voluntary 
co-operation. 

"The feudal state was one in which, it has been said, private 
law had usurped the place of public law." But rather is it 
truer that public law had failed and vanished and private law 
had come in to fill the vacuum. Public duty had become 
private obligation. 

§ 3 

We have already mentioned various kingdoms of the bar- 
barian tribes who set up a more or less flimsy dominion over 
this or that area amidst the debris of the emjjirc, the kingdoms 
of the Suevi and West Goths in Spain, the East-Gothic kingdom 
in Italy, and the Italian Lombard kingdom which succeeded the 
Goths after Justinian had expelled the latter and after the 
great pestilence had devastated Italy. The Frankish kingdom 
was another such barbarian power which arose first in what 
is now Belgium, and which spread southward to the Loire, 
but it developed far more strength and solidarity than any of 
the others. It was the first real state to emerge from the uni- 
versal wreckage. It became at last a wide and vigorous po- 
litical reality, and from it are derived two great powers of 
modern Europe, France and the German Empire. Its founder 
was Clevis (481-511) who began as a small king in Belgium 
and ended with his southern frontiers nearly at the Pyrenees. 
He divided his kingdom among his four sons, but the Franks 
* Encyclopcedia Britannica, article "Feudalism," by Professor G. B. Adamg. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



611 



retained a tradition of unity in spite of this division, and for 
a time fraternal wars for a single control united ratiier than 
divided them. A more serious split arose, however, through 
the Latinization of the Western Franks, who occupied Eoman- 
ized Gaul and who learnt to speak the corrupt Latin of the sub- 
ject population, while the Franks of the Khineland retained 



Tkvca. ttuyvc cnr Icsy wndcv TR3VNKI5H domxruorv in 
ihc Hztic oP CHA RLE5 TVTARTEL 




^r^-r 



their Low German speech. At a low level of civilization, dif- 
ferences in language cause very powerful political strains. For 
a hundred and fifty years the Frankish world was split in two, 
Neustria, the nucleus of France, speaking a Latinish speech, 
which became at last the French language we know, and Aus- 
trasia, the Rhineland, which remained German.^ 

^The Franks differed from the Swabians and South Germans, and came 
much nearer the Anglo-Saxons in that they spoke a "Low German" and 
not a "High German" dialect. Their language resembled plattdeutsch 
and Anglo-Saxon, and was the direct parent of Dutch and Flemish. In 
fact, the Franks where they were not Latinized became Flemings and 



612 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

We will not tell here of the decay of the dynasty, the Mero- 
vingian dynasty, founded by Clovis; nor how in Austrasia a 
certain court official, the Mayor of the Palace, gradually be- 
came the king de facto and used the real king as a puppet. 
The position of Mayor of the Palace also became hereditary 
in the seventh century, and in 687 a certain Pepin of Heris- 
thal, the Austrasian Mayor of the Palace, had conquered I^Teus- 
tria and reunited all the Franks. He was followed in 714 by 
his son, Charles Martel, who also bore no higher title than 
Mayor of the Palace. (His poor little Merovingian kings do 
not matter in the slightest degree to us here.) It was this 
Charles Martel who stopped the Moslems. They had pushed 
as far as Tours when he met them, and in a great battle be- 
tween that place and Poitiers (732) utterly defeated them and 
broke their spirit. Thereafter the Pyrenees remained their ut- 
most boundary ; they came no further into Western Europe. 

Charles Martel divided his power between two sons, but one 
resigned and went into a monastery, leaving his brother Pepin 
sole ruler. This Pepin it was who finally extinguished the 
descendants of Clovis. He sent to the Pope to ask who was 
the true king of the Franks, the man who held the power or 
the man who wore the crown ; and the Pope, who was in need 
of a svipporter, decided in favour of the Mayor of the Palace. 
So Pepin was chosen king at a gathering of the Prankish 
nobles in the Merovingian capital Soissons, and anointed and 
crowned. That was in 751. The Franco-Germany he united 
was consolidated by his son Charlemagne. It held together 
until the death of his grandson Louis (840), and then France 
and Germany broke away again — to the great injury of man- 
kind. It was not a difference of race or temperament, it was 
a difference of language and tradition that split these Prankish 
peoples asunder. 

That old separation of Neustria and Austrasia still works 
out in bitter consequences. In 1916 the ancient conflict of 
Neustria and Austrasia had broken out into war once more. 
In the August of that year the present writer visited Soissons, 
and crossed the temporary wooden bridge that had been built by 

"Dutchmen" of South Holland (North Holland is still Friesisch — i.e. 
Anglo-Saxon). The "French" which the Latinized Franks and Burgundians 
spoke in the seventh to the tenth centuries was remarkably like the 
Ruraansch language of Switzerland, judging from the vestiges that re- 
main in old documents. — H. H. J. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 613 

the English after the Battle of the Aisne from the main part 
of the town to the suburb of St. Medard. Canvas screens 
protected passengers upon the bridge from the observation of the 
German sharpshooters who were sniping from their trenches 
down the curve of the river. He went with his guides across 
a field and along by the wall of an orchard in which a German 
shell exploded as he passed. So he reached the battered build- 
ings that stand upon the site of the ancient abbey of St. Medard, 
in which the last Merovingian was deposed and Pepin the Short 
was crowned in his stead. Beneath these ancient buildings 
there were great crypts, very useful as dug-outs — for the Ger- 
man advanced lines were not more than a couple of hundred 
yards away. The sturdy French soldier lads were cooking 
and resting in these shelters, and lying down to sleep among 
the stone coffins that had held the bones of their Merovingian 
kings. 



The populations over which Charles Martel and King Pepin 
ruled were at very difi'erent levels of civilization in different 
districts. To the west and south the bulk of the people con- 
sisted of Latinized and Christian Kelts; in the central regions 
these rulers had to deal with such more or less Christianized 
Germans as the Franks and Burgimdians and Alemanni ; to 
the north-east were still pagan Frisians and Saxons; to the 
east were the Bavarians, recently Christianized through the 
activities of St. Boniface ; and to the east of them again pagan 
Slavs and Avars. The "Paganism" of the Germans and Slavs 
was very similar to the primitive religion of the Greeks; 
it was a manly religion in which temple, priest, and sacrifices 
played a small part, and its gods were like men, a kind of 
"school prefects" of more powerful beings who interfered im- 
pulsively and irregiilarly in human affairs. The Germans had 
a Jupiter in Odin, a Mars in Thor, a Venus in Freya, and 
so on. Throughout the seventh and eighth centuries a steady 
process of conversion to Christianity went on amidst these Ger- 
man and Slavonic tribes. 

It will be interesting to English-speaking readers to note 
that the most zealous and successful missionaries among the 
Saxons and Frisians came from England. Christianity was 
twice planted in the British Isles. It was already there while 



614 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Britain was a part of the Roman Empire; a martyr, St. Alban, 
gave his name to the town of St. Albans, and nearly every visitor 
to Canterbury has also visited little old St. Martin's church, 
which was used during the Eoman times. From Britain, as 
we have already said, Christianity spread beyond the imperial 
boundaries into Ireland — the chief missionary was St. Patrick — 
and there was a vigorous monastic movement with which are 
connected the names of St. Columba and the religious settle- 
ments of lona. Then in the fifth and sixth centuries came the 
fierce and pagan English, and they cut off the early Church 
of Ireland from the main body of Christianity. In the sev- 
enth century Christian missionaries were converting the Eng- 
lish, both in the north from Ireland and in the south from 
Bome. The Bome mission was sent by Pope Gregory the Great 
just at the close of the sixth century. The story goes that he 
saw English boys for sale in the Boman slave market, though 
it is a little difficult to understand how they got there. They 
were very fair and good-looking. In answer to his inquiries, 
he was told that they were Angles. "Not Angles, but Angels," 
said he, "had they but the gospel." 

The mission worked through the seventh century. Before 
that centui*y was over, most of the English were Christians; 
though Mercia, the central English kingdom, held out stoutly 
against the priests and for the ancient faith and ways. And 
there was a swift progress in learning upon the part of these 
new converts. The monasteries of the kingdom of Northum- 
bria in the north of England became a centre of light and 
learning. Theodore of Tarsus was one of the earliest arch- 
bishops of Canterbury (669-690). "While Greek was utterly 
unknown in the west of Europe, it was mastered by some of 
the pupils of Theodore. The monasteries contained many monks 
who were excellent scholars. Most famous of all was Bede, 
known as the Venerable Bede (673-735), a monk of Jarrow 
(on Tyne). He had for his pupils the six hundred monks of 
that monastery, besides the many strangers who came to hear 
him. Ho gradually mastered all the learning of his day, and 
left at his death forty-five volumes of his writings, the most 
important of which are 'The Ecclesiastical History of the Eng- 
lish' and his translation of the Gospel of John into English. 
Sis writings were widely known and used throughout Europe. 
He reckoned all dates from the birth of Christ, and through 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



615 



liis works tlie use of Christian chronology became common in 
Europe. Owing to the large number of monasteries and monks 




in Northumbria, that part of England was for a time far 
in advance of the south in civilization." ^ 

In the seventh and eighth centuries we find the English 
missionaries active upon the eastern frontiers of the Frankish 
* J. General History of Europe, Thatcher and Schwill. 



G16 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

kingdom. Chief among these was St. Boniface (680-755), 
who was born at Crediton, in Devonshire, who converted the 
Frisians, Thuringians, and Hessians, and who was martyred in 
Holland. 

Both in England and on the Continent the ascendant rulers 
seized upon Christianity as a unifying force to cement their 
conquests. Christianity became a banner for aggressive chiefs 
— as it did in Uganda in Africa in the bloody days before that 
country was annexed to the British Empire. After Pepin, 
who died in 768, came two sons, Charles and another, who 
divided his kingdom; but the brother of Charles died in 771, 
and Charles then became sole king (771-814) of the growing 
realm of the Franks. This Charles is known in history as 
Charles the Great, or Charlemagne. As in the case of Alexan- 
der the Great and Julius Csesar, posterity has enormously ex- 
aggerated his memory. He made his wars of aggression defi- 
nitely religious wars. All the world of north-western Europe, 
which is now Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, 
and Norway and Sweden, was in the ninth century an arena 
of bitter conflict between the old faith and the new. Whole 
nations were converted to Christianity by the sword just as 
Islam in Arabia, Central Asia, and Africa bad converted 
whole nations a century or so before. 

With fire and sword Charlemagne preached the Gospel of 
the Cross to the Saxons, Bohemians, and as far as the Danube 
into what is now Hungary ; he carried the same teaching down 
the Adriatic Coast through what is now Dalmatia, and drove 
the Moslems back from the Pyrenees as far as Barcelona. 

Moreover, he it was who sheltered Egbert, an exile from 
Wessex, in England, and assisted him presently to establish 
himself as King in Wessex (802). Egbert subdued the Brit- 
ons in Cornwall, as Charlemagne conquered the Britons of 
Brittany, and, by a series of wars, which he continued after 
the death of his Prankish patron, made himself at last the first 
K.ng of all England (828). 

But the attacks of Charlemagne upon the last strongholds of 
paganism provoked a vigorous reaction on the part of the un- 
converted. The Christianized English had retained very little 
of the seamanship that had brought them from the mainland, 
and the Franks had mot yet become seamen. As the Christian 
propaganda of Charlemagne swept towards the shores of the 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



617 



North and Baltic Seas, the pagans were driven to the sea. They 
retaliated for the Christian persecutions with plundering raids 
and expeditions against the northern coasts of France and 



Tvc^hj oT'WcJxnorc 




against Christian England. These pagan Saxons and English 
of the mainland and their kindred from Denmark and Nor- 
way are the Danes and* Northmen of our national histories. 
They were also called Vikings,^ which means "inlet-men," be- 
^N.B. — Vik-ings, not Vi-kings, Vik = a fiord or inlet. 



618 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

cause they came from the deep inlets of the Scandinavian coast. 
They came in long black galleys, making little use of sails. 
Most of our information about these wars and invasions of the 
Pagan Vikings is derived from Christian sources, and so 
we have abundant information of the massacres and atrocities 
( of their raids and very little about the cruelties inflicted upon 
'' their pagan brethren, the Saxons, at the hands of Charlemagne. 
Their animus against the cross and against monks and nuns 
was extreme. They delighted in the burning of monasteries 
and nunneries and the slaughter of their inmates. 

Throughout the period between the fifth and the ninth cen- 
turies these Vikings or Northmen were learning seamanship, 
becoming bolder, and ranging further. They braved the north- 
ern seas until the icy shores of Greenland were a familiar 
haunt, and by the ninth century they had settlements (of which 
Europe in general knew nothing) in America. In the tenth 
and eleventh centuries many of their sagas began to be written 
down in Iceland. They saw the world in terms of valiant ad- 
venture. They assailed the walrus, the bear, and the whale. In 
their imaginations, a great and rich city to the south, a sort of 
confusion of Rome and Byzantium, loomed large. They called 
it ^'Miklagard" (]\Iichael's court) or Micklegarth. The mag- 
netism of Micklegarth was to draw the descendants of these 
Northmen down into the Mediterranean by two routes, by the 
west and also across Russia from the Baltic, as we shall tell 
later. By the Russian route went also the kindred Swedes. 

So long as Charlemagne and Egbert lived, the Vikings were 
no more than raiders; but as the ninth century wore on, these 
raids developed into organized invasions. In several districts 
of England the hold of Christianity was by no means firm as 
yet. In Mercia in particular the pagan Northmen found sym- 
pathy and help. By 886 the Danes had conquered a fair part 
of England, and the English king, Alfred the Great, had rec- 
ognized their rule over their conquests, the Dane-law, in the 
pact he made with Guthrum their leader. A little later, in 912, 
another expedition under Rolf the Ganger established itself 
upon the coast of France in the region that was known hence- 
forth as Normandy (= Northman-dy). But of how there was 
presently a fresh conquest of England by the Danes, and how 
finally the Duke of Normandy became King of England, we 
cannot tell at any length. There were very small racial and 






CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 619 

social differences between Angle, Saxon, Jute, Dane, or Nor- 
man ; and though these changes loom large in the imaginations 
of the English, they are seen to be very slight rufflings indeed 
of the stream of history when we measure them by the stand- 
ards of a greater world. The issue between Christianity and 
paganism vanished presently from the struggle. By the Treaty 
of Wedmore the Danes agreed to be baptized if they were as- 
sured of their conquests ; and the descendants of Eolf in ISTor- 
mandy were not merely Christianized, but they learnt to speak 
French from the more civilized people about them, forgetting 
their own Norse tongue. Of much greater significance in the 
history of mankind are the relations of Charlemagne with his 
neighbours to the south and east, and to the imperial tradition. 



Through Charlemagne the tradition of the Eoman Caesar was 
revived in Europe. The Roman Empire was dead and de- 
caying; the Byzantine Empire was far gone in decline; but 
the education and mentality of Europe had sunken to a level at 
which new creative political ideas were probably impossible. In 
all Europe there survived not a tithe of the speculative vigour 
that we find in the Athenian literature of the fifth century B.C. 
There was no power to postulate a new occasion or to conceive 
and organize a novel political method. Official Christianity ; 
had long overlaid and accustomed itself to ignore those strange) 
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from which it had arisen. The\ 
Roman Church, clinging tenaciously to its possession of the I 
title of pontifex maximus, had long since abandoned its ap-i 
pointed task of achieving the Kingdom of Heaven. It was ; 
preoccupied with the revival of Roman ascendancy on earth, 
which it conceived of as its inheritance. It had become a 
political body, using the faith and needs of simple men to 
forward its schemes. Europe drifted towards a dreary imita- 
tion and revival of the misconceived failures of the past. For 
eleven centuries from Charlemagne onwards, "Emperors" and 
''Csesars" of this line and that come and go in the history of 
Europe like fancies in a disordered mind. We shall have to 
tell of a great process of mental growth in Europe, of enlarged 
horizons and accumulating power, but it was a process that 
went on independently of, and in spite of, the political forms 



620 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 621 

of the time, until at last it shattered those forms altogether. 
Europe during those eleven centuries of the imitation Cuesars 
which began with Charlemagne, and which closed only in the 
monstrous bloodshed of 1914-1918, has been like a busy factory 
owned by a somnambulist, who is sometimes quite unimpor- 
tant and sometimes disastrously in the way. Or rather than 
a somnambulist, let us say by a corpse that magically simulates 
a kind of life. The Roman Empire staggers, sprawls, is thrust 
off the stage, and reappears, and — if we may carry the image 
one step further— it is the Church of Rome which plays the 
part of the magician and keeps this corpse alive. 

And throughout the whole period there is always a struggle 
going on for the control of the corpse between the spiritual and 
various temporal powers. We have already noted the spirit of 
St.. Aug-ustine's City of God. It was a book which we know 
Charlemagne read, or had read to him — for his literary accom- 
plishments are rather questionable. He conceived of this Chris- 
tian Empire as being ruled and maintained in its orthodoxy by 
some such great Ca?sar as himself. He was to rule even the 
Pope. But at Rome the view taken of the revived empire dif- 
fered a little from that. There the view taken was that the 
Christian Caesar must be anointed and guided by the Pope — 
who would even have the power to excommunicate and depose 
him. Even in the time of Charlemagne this divergence of view 
was apparent. In the following centuries it became acute. 

The idea of the revived Empire dawned only very gradually 
upon the mind of Charlemagne. At first he was simply the 
ruler of his father's kingdom of the Franks, and his powers 
were fully occupied in struggles with the Saxons and Bavarians, 
and with the Slavs to the east of them, with the Moslem in 
Spain, and with various insurrections in his own dominions. 
And as the result of a quarrel with the King of Lombardy, 
his father-in-law, he conquered Lombardy and North Italy. 
We have noted the establishment of the Lombards in North 
Italy about 570 after the great pestilence, and after the over- 
throw of the East Gothic kings by Justinian. These Lombards 
had always been a danger and a fear to the Popes, and there 
had been an alliance between Pope and Prankish King against 
them in the time of Pepin. Now Charlemagne completely sub- 
jugated Lombardy (774), sent his father-in-law to a monastery, 
and carried his conquests beyond the present north-eastern 



622 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

boundaries of Italy into Dalmatia in 776. In 781 he caused 
one of his sons, Pepin, who did not outlive him, to be crowned 
King of Italy in Rome. 

There was a new Pope, Leo III, in 795^ who seems from the 
first to have resolved to make Charlemagne emperor. Hith- 
erto the court at Byzantium had possessed a certain indefinite 
authority over the Pope. Strong emperors like Justinian had 
bullied the Popes and obliged them to come to Constantinople; 
weak emperors had annoyed them ineffectively. The idea of a 
breach, both secular and religious, with Constantinople had 
long been entertained at the Lateran,^ and in the Prankish 
power there seemed to be just the support that was necessary if 
Constantinople was to be defied. So at his accession Leo III 
sent the keys of the tomb of St. Peter and a banner to Charle- 
magne as the symbols of his sovereignty in Rome as King 
of Italy. Very soon the Pope had to appeal to the protection he 
had chosen. He was unpopular in Rome; he was attacked and 
ill-treated in the streets during a procession, and obliged to 
fly to Germany (799). Eginhard says his eyes were gouged 
out and his tongue cut off; he seems, however, to have had both 
eyes and tongaie again a year later. Charlemagne brought him 
back and reinstated him (800). 

Then occurred a very important scene. On Christmas Day, 
in the year 800, as Charles was rising from prayer in the 
Church of St. Peter, the Pope, who had everything in readi- 
ness, clapped a crown upon his head and hailed him Caesar 
and Augustus. There was great popular applause. But Egin- 
hard, the friend and biographer of Charlemagne, says that the 
new emperor was by no means pleased by this coup of Pope 
Leo's. If he had known this was to happen, he said, "he 
would not have entered the church, great festival though it 
was." No doubt he had been thinking and talking of making 
himself emperor, but he had evidently not intended that the 
Pope should make him emperor. He had some idea of marry- 
ing the Empress Irene, who at that time reigned in Constanti- 
nople, and so becoming monarch of both Eastern and Western 
Empires. He was now obliged to accept the title in the manner 
that Leo III had adopted as a gift from the Pope, and in a 
way that estranged Constantinople and secured the separation 
of Rome from the Byzantine Church. 

* The Lateran was the earlier palace of the Popes in Rome. Later they 
occupied the Vatican. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 623 

At first Byzantium was unwilling to recognize the imperial 
title of Charlemag-ne. But in 810 a great disaster fell upon 
the Byzantine Empire. The pagan Bulgarians, under their 
Prince Krum (802-814), defeated and destroyed the armies 
of the Emperor Nicephorus, whose skull became a drinking- 
cup for Krum. The greater part of the Balkan peninsula was 
conquered by these people. (The Bulgarian and the English 
nations thus became established as political unities almost 
simultaneously.) After this misfortune Byzantium was in no 
position to dispute this revival of the empire in the West, and 
in 812 Charlemagne was formally recognized by Byzantine 
envoys as Emperor and Augustus. 

So the Empire of Rome, which had died at the hands of 
Odoacer in 476, rose again in 800 as the ^'Holy Roman Em- 
pire." While its physical strength lay north of the Alps, the 
centre of its idea was Rome. It was therefore from the begin- 
ning a divided thing of uncertain power, a claim and an argu- 
ment rather than a necessary reality. The German sword was 
always clattering over the Alps into Italy, and missions and 
legates toiling over in the reverse direction. But the Germans 
could never hold Italy permanently, because they could not 
stand the malaria that the ruined, neglected, undrained country 
fostered. And in Rome, as well as in several other of the cities 
of Italy, there smouldered a more ancient tradition, the tradi- 
tion of the aristocratic republic, hostile to both Emperor and 
Pope. 

§ 6 

In spite of the fact that we have a life of him written by his 
contemporary, Eginhard,^ the character and personality of 
Charlemagne are difficult to visualize. Eginhard lacks vivid- 
ness; he tells many particulars, but not the particulars that 
make a man live again in the record. Charlemagne, he says, 
was a tall man, with a rather feeble voice; and he had bright 
eyes and a long nose. "The top of his head was round," what- 
ever that may mean, and his hair was "white." He had a thick, 
rather short neck, and "his belly too prominent." He wore a 
tunic with a silver border, and gartered hose. He had a blue 
cloak, and was always girt with his sword, hilt and belt being 
^ Eginhard'a Life of Karl the Great. (Glaister.) 



624 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of gold and silver. He was evidently a man of great activity, 
one imagines him moving quickly, and his numerous love affairs 
did not interfere at all with his incessant military and political 
labours. He had numerous wives and mistresses. He took much 
exercise, was fond of pomp and religious ceremonies, and gave 
generously. He was a man of very miscellaneous activity and 
great intellectual enterprise, and with a self-confidence that is 
rather suggestive of William II, the ex-German Emperor, the 
last, perhaps for ever, of this series of imitation Caesars in 
Europe which Charlemagne began. 

The mental life that Eginhard records of him is interesting, 
because it not only gives glimpses of a curious character, but 
serves as a sample of the intellectuality of the time. He could 
read probably; at meals he "listened to music or reading," but 
we are told that he had not acquired the art of writing; ''he used 
to keep his writing-book and tablets under his pillow, that when 
he had leisure he might practise his hand in forming letters, 
but he made little progress in an art begun too late in life." 
He had, however, a real respect for learning and a real desire 
for knowledge, and he did his utmost to attract men of learning 
to his court. Among others who came was Alcuin, a learned 
Englishman. All those learned men were, of course, clergymen, 
there being no other learned men, and naturally they gave a 
strongly clerical tinge to the information they imparted to their 
master. At his court, which was usually at Aix-la-Chapelle or 
Mayence, he maintained in the winter months a curious institu- 
tion called his "school," in which he and his erudite associates 
affected to lay aside all thoughts of worldly position, assumed 
names taken from the classical writers or from Holy Writ, and 
discoursed upon theology and literature. Charlcmag-ne himself 
was "David." He developed a considerable knowledire of the- 
ology, and it is to him that we must ascribe the addition of the 
words filio que to the Nicene Creed, an addition that finally 
split the Latin and Greek churches asunder. But it is more 
than doubtful if he had any such separation in mind. He 
wanted to add a word or so to the creed, just as the Emperor 
William II wanted to write operas and paint pictures,^ and be 
took up what was originally a Spanish innovation. 

'The addition was discreetly opposed by Leo III "In the correspondence 
between them the Pope assumes the liberality of a statesman and the 
prince descends to the prejudice and passions of a priest." — Gibbon, 
chap. Ix. 



II 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 625 

Of his organization of his empire there is little to be said 
here. He was far too restless and busy to consider the quality 
of his successor or the condition of political stability, and the 
most noteworthy thing in this relationship is that he particu- 
larly schooled his son and successor, Louis the Pious (814-840), 
to take the crown from the altar and crouni himself. But Louis 
the Pious was too pious to adhere to those instructions when 
the Pope made an objection. 

The legislation of Charlemagne was greatly coloured by Bible' 
redding ; he knew his Bible well, as the times went ; and it is 
characteristic of him that after he had been crowned emperor 
he required every male subject above the age of twelve to renew 
his oath of allegiance, and to undertake to be not simply a good 
subject, but a good Christian. To refuse baptism and to re- 
tract after baptism were crimes punishable by death. Hp did 
much to encourage architecture, and imported many Italian 
architects, chiefly from Eavenna, to whom we owe many of 
the pleasant Byzantine buildings that still at Worms and 
Cologne and elsewhere delight the tourist in the Ehineland. 
He founded a number of cathedrals and monastic schools, did 
much to encourage the study of classical Latin, and was a dis- 
tinguished amateur of church music. The possibility of his 
talking Latin and understanding Greek is open to discussion; 
probably he talked French-Latin. Prankish, however, was his 
habitual tongue. He made a collection of old German songs 
and tales, but these were destroyed by his successor Louis the 
Pious on account of their paganism. 

He corresponded with Haroun-al-Raschid, the Abbasid Caliph 
at Bagdad, who was not perhaps the less friendly to him on 
account of his vigorous handling of the Omayyad Arabs in 
Spain. Gibbon supposes that this ''public correspondence was 
founded on vanity," and that "their remote situation left no 
room for a competition of interest." But with the Byzantine 
Empire between them in the East, and the independent cal- 
iphate of Spain in the West, and a common danger in the Turks 
of the great plains, they had three very excellent reasons for 
cordiality. Haroun-al-Raschid, says Gibbon, sent Charlemagne 
by his ambassadors a splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant, 
and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. The last item suggests 
that Charlemagne was to some extent regarded by the Saracen 
monarch as the protector of the Christians and Christian prop- 



626 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

erties in his dominions. Some historians declare explicitly 
that there was a treaty to that eftect. 



The Empire of Charlemagne did not outlive his son and suc- 
cessor, Louis the Pious. It fell apart into its main constituents. 
The Latinized Keltic and Frankish population of Gaul begins 
now to be recognizable as France, though this France was broken 
up into a number of dukedoms and principalities, often with 
no more than a nominal unity ; the German-speaking peoples 
between the Ehine and the Slavs to the east similarly begin to 
develop an even more fragmentary intimation of Germany. 
When at length a real emperor reappears in Western Europe 
(9C2), he is not a Frank, but a Saxon; the conquered in Ger- 
many have become the masters. 

It is impossible here to trace the events of the ninth and tenth 
centuries in any detail, the alliances^ the treacheries, the claims 
and acquisitions. Everywhere there was lawlessness, war, and 
a struggle for power. In 987 the nominal kingdom of France 
passed from the hands of the Carlovingians, the last descendants 
of Charlemagne, into the hands of Hugh Capet, who founded 
a new dynasty. Most of his alleged subordinates were in fact 
independent, and willing to make war on the king at the slightest 
provocation. The dominions of the Duke of Normandy, for 
example, were more extensive and more powerful than the 
patrimony of Hugh Capet. Almost the only unity of this 
France over which the king exercised a nominal authority lay 
in the common resolution of its great provinces to resist in- 
corporation in any empire dominated either by a German ruler 
or by the Pope. Apart from the simple organization dictated 
by that common will, France was a mosaic of practically in- 
dependent nobles. It was an era of castle-building and fortifi- 
cation, and what was called "private war" throughout all 
Europe. 

The state of Rome in the tenth century is almost indescri- 
bable. The decay of the Empire of Charlemagne left the Pope 
without a protector, threatened by Byzantium and the Saracens 
(who had taken Sicily), and face to face with the unruly nobles 
of Rome. Among the most powerful of these were two women, 
Theodora and Marozia, mother and daughter^ who in sueces- 
* Gibbon mentions a second Theodora, the sister of Marozia. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 627 

sion held the Castle of St. Angelo (§ 1), which Theophylact, 
the patrician husband of Theodora, had seized with most of the 
temporal power of the Pope ; these two women were as bold, 
unscrupulous, and dissolute as any maje prince of the time 
could have been, and they are abused by historians as thout^h 
they were ten times worse. Marozia seized and imprisoned 
Pope John X (928), who speedily died under her care. She 
subsequently made her illegitimate son pope, under the title of 
John XI. After him her grandson, John XII, filled the chair 
of St. Peter. Gibbon's account of the manners and morals of 
John XII takes refuge at last beneath a veil of Latin footnotes. 
This Pope, John XII, was finally degraded by the new German 
Emperor Otto, who came over the Alps and down into Italy to 
be crowned in 962.^ 

This new line of Saxon emperors, which thus comes into 
prominence, sprang from a certain Henry the Fowler, who was 
elected King of Germany by an assembly of German nobles, 
princes, and prelates in 919. In 936 he was succeeded as King 
by his son. Otto I, surnamed the Great, who was also elected 
to be his successor at Aix-la-Chapelle, and who finally descended 
upon Kome at the invitation of John XII, to be crowned 
emperor in 962. His subsequent degradation of John was 
forced upon him by that pope's treachery. With his assumption 
of the imperial digTiity, Otto I did not so much overcome Rome 
as restore the ancient tussle of Pope and Emperor for ascend- 
ancy to something like decency and dignity again. Otto I was 
followed by Otto" II (973-983), and he again by a third Otto 
(983-1002).2 

The struggle between the Emperor and the Pope for ascend- 
ancy over the Holy Roman Empire plays a large part in the 

* This period is a tangled one. The authority is Gregorovius, History 
of the City of Rome in the Mifldle Ages. John X owed the tiara to his 
mistress, the elder Theodora, but he was "the foremost statesman of his 
age." He fell in 028 owing to Marozia. John XI became Pope in 0.31 
(after two Popes had intervened in the period 928-031) ; he was Marozia's 
son, possibly by Pope Sergius III. John XII did not come at once after 
John XI, who died in 936; there were several Popes in between; and 
he became Pope in 955. — E. B. 

* There were three dynasties of emperors in the early middle ages: 
Saxon: Otto I (062)' to Henry II, ending 1024. 

Salian: Conrad II to Henry V, ending about 1125. 
Hohenstaufen: Conrad III to Frederic II, ending in 1250. 
The Hohenstaufens were Swabian in origin. Then came the Habsburgs 
with Rudolph I in 1273, who lasted until 1918. 



628 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

history of the early Middle Ages, and we shall have presently 
to sketch its chief phases. Though the church never sank quite 
to the level of John XII again, nevertheless the story fluctuates 
through phases of great violence, confusion, and intrigue. Yet 
the outer history of Christendom is not the whole history of 
Christendom. That the Lateran was as cunning, foolish, and 
criminal as most other contemporary courts has to be recorded ; 
but, if we are to keep due proportions in this history, it must 
not be unduly emphasized. We must remember that through 
all those ages, leaving profound consequences, but leaving no 
conspicuous records upon the historian's page, countless men 
and women were touched by that Spirit of Jesus which still 
lived and lives still at the core of Christianity, that they led 
lives that were on the whole gracious and helpful, and that they 
did unselfish and devoted deeds. Through those ages such lives 
cleared the air and made a better world possible. Just as in 
the Moslem world the Spirit of Islam generation by generation 
produced its crop of courage, integrity, and kindliness. 



While the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of France 
and England were thus appearing amidst the extreme political 
fragmentation of the civilization of Western Europe, both that 
civilization and the Byzantine Empire were being subjected to 
a threefold attack : from the Saracen powers, from the North- 
men, and, more slowly developed and most formidable of all, 
from a new westward thrust of the Turkish peoples through 
South Russia, and also by way of Armenia and the Empire 
of Bagdad from Central Asia. 

After the overthrow of the Omayyads by the Abbasid dynasty, 
the strength of the Saracenic impulse against Europe dimin- 
ished. Islam was no longer united. Spain was under a sepa- 
rate Omayyad Caliph, North Africa, though nominally sub- 
ject to the Abbasids, was really independent, and presently 
(969) Egypt became a separate power with a Shiite Caliph of 
its own, a pretender claiming descent from AH and Fatima 
(the Fatimite Caliphate). These Egyptian Fatimites, the 
green flag Moslems, were fanatics in comparison with the 
Abbasids, and did much to embitter the genial relations of 
Islam and Christianity. They took Jerusalem, and interfered 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



629 



FRANCE at ^ dcse ofi^'lO^ Ccntnz^ 



Royai Potnam 

Tiefs of the. 
Crown 




> -NAVATtHE 



630 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

with the Christian access to the Holy Sepulchre. On the other 
side of the shrunken Abbasid domain there was also a Shiite 
kingdom in Persia. The chief Saracen conquest in the ninth 
century was Sicily; but this was not overrun in the grand old 
style in a year or so, but subjugated tediously through a long 
century, and with many set-backs. The Spanish Saracens dis- 
puted in Sicily with the Saracens from Africa. In Spain the 
Saracens were giving ground before a renascent Christian effort. 
Nevertheless, the Byzantine Empire and Western Christendom 
were still so weak upon the Mediterranean Sea that the Saracen 
raiders and pirates from ISTorth Africa were able to raid almost 
unchallenged in South Italy and the Greek Islands. 

But now a new force was appearing in the Mediterranean. 
We have already remarked that the Eoman Empire never ex- 
tended itself to the shores of the Baltic Sea, nor had ever the 
vigour to push itself into Denmark. The Nordic Aryan peoples 
of these neglected regions learnt much from the empire that 
was unable to subdue them; as we have already noted, they 
developed the art of shipbuilding and became bold seamen; 
they spread across the North Sea to the west, and across the 
Baltic and up the Russian rivers into the very heart of what 
is now Russia. One of their earliest settlements in Russia was 
Novgorod the Great. There is the same trouble and con- 
fusion for the student of history with these northern 
tribes as there is with the Scythians of classical times, 
and with the Hunnish Turkish peoples of Eastern and Central 
Asia. They appear under a great variety of names, they 
change and intermingle. In the case of Britain, for example, 
the Angles, the Saxons, and Jutes conquered most of what is 
now England in the ftfth and sixth centuries; the Danes, a 
second wave of practically the same people, followed in the 
eighth and ninth ; and in 1016 a Danish King, Canute the 
Great, reigned in England, and not only over England, but over 
Denmark and Norway. His subjects sailed to Iceland, Green- 
land, and perhaps to the American continent. For a time, 
under Canute and his sons, it seemed possible that a great con- 
federation of the Northmen might have established itself. Then 
in 1066 a third wave of the same people flowed over England 
from the "Norman" state in France, where the Northmen had 
been settled since the days of Rolf the Ganger (912), and 
where they had learnt to speak French. William, Duke of 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 631 

Normandy, became the William the Conqueror (1066) of Eng- 
lish history. Practically, from the standpoint of universal his- 
tory, all these peoples were the same people, waves 
of one Nordic stock. These waves were not only flowing 
westward, but eastward. Already we have mentioned a 
very interesting earlier movement of the same peoples under 
the name of Goths from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We have 
traced the splitting of these Goths into the Ostrogoths and tiie 
Visigoths, and the adventurous wanderings that ended at last 
in the Ostrogoth kingdom in Italy and the Visigoth states in 
Spain. In the ninth century a second movement of the iSTorth- 
men across Russia was going on at the same time that their 
establishments in England and their dukedom of Normandy 
were coming into existence. The population of South Scotland, 
England, East Ireland, Flanders, Normandy, and the Russias 
have more elements in common than we are accustomed to recog- 
nize. All are fundamentally Gothic and Nordic peoples. Even 
in their weights and measures the kinship of Russian and 
English is to be noted ; both have the Norse inch and foot, and 
many early Norman churches in England are built on a scale 
that shows the use of the sajene (7 it.) and quarter sajene, a 
Norse measure still used in Russia. These "Russian" Norse- 
men travelled in the summer-time, using the river routes that 
abounded in Russia ; they carried their ships by portages from 
the northward-running rivers to those flowing southward. They 
appeared as pirates, raiders, and traders both upon the Caspian 
and the Black Sea. The Arabic chroniclers note their appari- 
tion upon the Caspian, and learnt to call them Russians. They 
raided Persia, and threatened Constantinople with a great fleet 
of small craft (in 865, 904, 941, and 1043 ).i One of these 
Northmen, Rurik {circa 850), established himself as the ruler 
of Novgorod and his successor, the duke Oleg, took Kief, and 
laid the foundations of modern Russia. The fighting qualities 
of the Russian Vikings were speedily appreciated at Constan- 
tinople; the Greeks called them Varangians, and an Imperial 
Varangian bodyguard was formed. After the conquest of 
England by the Normans (1066), a number of Danes and 
English were driven into exile and joined these Russian Varan- 
gians, apparently finding few obstacles to intercourse in their 
speech and habits. 

'These dates are from Gibbon. Beazley gives 865, 904-7, 935, 944, 971-2. 
(History of Russia, Clarendon Press.) 



632 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Meanwhile the Normans from Normandy were also finding 
their way into the Mediterranean from the West. They came 
first as mercenaries, and later as independent invaders; and 
they came mainly, not, it is to be noted, by sea, but in scattered 
bands by land. They came through the Ehineland and Italy 
partly in the search for warlike employment and loot, partly as 
pilgrims. For the ninth and tenth centuries saw a great de- 
velopment of pilgrimage. These Normans, as they grew power- 
ful, discovered themselves such rapacious and vigorous robbers 
that they forced the Eastern Emperor and the Pope into a feeble 
and ineffective alliance against them (1053). They defeated 
and captured and were pardoned by the Pope ; they established 
themselves in Calabria and South Italy, conquered Sicily from 
the Saracens (1060-1090), and under Kobert Guiscard, who 
had entered Italy as a pilgrim adventurer and began his career 
as a brigand in Calabria, threatened the Byzantine Empire 
itself (1081). His army, which contained a contingent of 
Sicilian Moslems, crossed from Brindisi to Epirus in the re- 
verse direction to that in which Pyrrhus had crossed to attack 
the Roman Republic, thirteen centuries before (275 B.C.). He 
laid siege to the Byzantine stronghold of Durazzo. 

Robert captured Durazzo (1082), but the pressure of affairs 
in Italy recalled him, and ultimately put an end to this first 
Norman attack upon the Empire of Byzantium, leaving the way 
open for the rule of a comparatively vigorous Comnenian 
dynasty (1081-1204). In Italy, amidst conflicts too complex 
for us to tell here, it fell to Robert Guiscard to besiege and 
sack Rome (1084) ; and Gibbon notes with quiet satisfaction 
the presence of that contingent of Sicilian Moslems amongst 
the looters. There were in the twelfth century three other 
Norman attacks upon the Eastern power, one by the son of 
Robert Guiscard, and the two others directly from Sicily by 
sea. . . . 

But neither the Saracens nor the Normans pounded quite so 
heavily against the old empire at Byzantium or against the 
Holy Roman Empire, the vamped-up Roman Empire of the 
West, as did the double thrust from the Turanian centres in 
Central Asia, of which we must now tell. We have already 
noted the westward movement of the Avars, and the Turkish 
Magyars who followed in their track. From the days of Pepin 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 






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634 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



I onward, the Frankish power and its successors in Germany 
were in conflict with these Eastern raiders along all the Eastern 
borderlands. Charlemagne held and punished them, and estab- 
lished some sort of overlordship as far east as the Carpathians ; 
but amidst the enfeeblement that followed his death, these peo- 
ples, more or less blended now in the accounts under the name 



^Rc CCMTNG cPthc STITJUJCS^' 




Other T^lcm, 
(Shiiiz) kingdoms 



of Hungarians, led by the Magyars, re-established their com- 
plete freedom again, and raided yearly, often as far as the 
Rhine. They destroyed. Gibbon notes, the monastery of St. 
Gall in Switzerland, and the town of Bremen. Their great 
raiding period was between 900 and 950. Their biggest effort, 
through Germany right into France, thence over the Alps and 
home again by North Italy, was in 938-9. 

Thrust southward by these disturbances, and by others to 
be presently noted, the Bulgarians established themselves under 
Krum, between the Danube and Constantinople. Originally a 
Turkish people, the Bulgarians, since their first appearance in 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 635 

the east of Russia, had become by repeated admixture almost 
entirely Slavonic in race and language. For some time after 
their establishment in Bulgaria they remained pagan. Their 
king, Boris (852-884), entertained Moslem envoys, and seems 
to have contemplated an adhesion to Islam, but finally he mar- 
ried a Byzantine princess, and handed himself and his people 
over to the Christian faith. 

The Hungarians were drubbed into a certain respect for 
civilization by Henry the Fowler, the elected King of Ger- 
many, and Otto the First, the first Saxon emperor, in the tenth 
century. But they did not decide to adopt Christianity until 
about A.D. 1000. Though they were Christianized, they re- 
tained their own Turko-Finnic language (Magyar), and they 
retain it to this day. 

Bulgarians and Hungarians do not, however, exhaust the 
catalogue of the peoples whose westward movements embodied 
the Turkish thrust across South Russia. Behind the Hungarians 
and Bulgarians thrust the Khazars, a Turkish people, with 
whom were mingled a very considerable proportion 'of Jews 
who had been expelled from Constantinople, and who had mixed 
with them and made many proselytes. To these Jewish Khazars 
are to be ascribed the great settlements of Jews in Poland and 
Russia.^ Behind the Khazars again, and overrunning them, 
were the Petschenegs (or Patzinaks), a savage Turkish people 
who are first heard of in the ninth century, and who were des- 
tined to dissolve and vanish as the kindred Huns did five cen- 
turies before. And while the trend of all these peoples was west- 
ward, we have, when we are thinking of the present population of 
these South Russian regions, to remember also the coming and 
going of the I^orthmen between the Baltic and the Black Sea, 
who inter^vove with the Turkish migrants like warp and woof, 
and bear in mind also that there was a considerable Slavonic 
population, the heirs and descendants of Scythians, Sarmatians, 
and the like, already established in these restless, lawless, but 
fertile areas. All these races mixed with and reacted upon one 
another. The universal prevalence of Slavonic languages, except 
in Hungary, shows that the population remained predomi- 
nantly Slav. And in what is now Roumania, for all the passage 

*"A Turkish people whose leaders had adopted Judaism," says Harold 
Williams. 



636 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of peoples, and in spite of conquest after conquest, the tradition 
and inheritance of the Roman provinces of Dacia and Moesia 
Inferior still kept a Latin speech and memory alive. 

But this direct thrust of the Turkish peoples aj^ainst Chris- 
tendom to the north of the Black Sea was, in the end, not nearly 
so important as their indirect thrust south of it through the 
empire of the Caliph, We cannot deal here with the tribes and 
dissensions of the Turkish peoples of Turkestan, nor with the 
particular causes that brought to the fore the tribes under the 
rule of the Seljuk clan. In the eleventh century these Seljuk 
Turks broke with irresistible force not in one army, but in a 
group of armies, and under two brothers, into the decaying frag- 
ments of the Moslem Empire. For Islam had long ceased to 
be one empire. The orthodox Sunnite Abbasid rule had 
shrunken to what was once Babylonia ; and even in Bagdad the 
Caliph was the mere creature of his Turkish palace gTiards. A 
sort of mayor of the palace, a Turk, was the real ruler. East 
of the Caliph, in Persia, and west of him in Palestine, Syria, 
and Egypt, were Shiite heretics. The Seljuk Turks were 
orthodox Sunnites ; they now swept down upon and conquered 
the Shiite rulers and upstarts, and established themselves as 
the protectors of the Bagdad Caliph, taking over the temporal 
powers of the mayor of the palace. Very early they conquered 
Armenia from the Greeks, and then, breaking the bounds that 
had restrained the pow-er of Islam for four centuries, they swept 
on to the conquest of Asia Minor, almost to the gates of Con- 
stantinople. The mountain barrier of Cilicia that had held the 
Moslem so long had been turned by the conquest of Armenia 
from the north-east. Under Alp Arslan, who had united all the 
Seljuk power in his own hands, the Turks utterly smashed the 
Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert, or Melasgird 
(i071). The effect of this battle upon people's imaginations 
was very great. Islam, which had appeared far gone in decay, 
which had been divided religiously and politically, was sud- 
denly discovered to have risen again, and it was the secure old 
Byzantine Empire that seemed on the brink of dissolution. The 
loss of Asia Minor was very swift. The Seljuks established 
themselves at Iconium (Konia), in what is now Anatolia. In 
a little while they were in possession of the fortress of Nicsea 
over against the capital. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 637 



§ 9 

We have already told of the attack of the Normans upon the 
Byzantine Empire from the west, and of the battle of Durazzo 
(1081) ; and we have noted that Constantinople had still vivid 
memories of the Kussia sea raids (1043). Bulgaria, it is true, 
had been tamed, but there was heavy and uncertain warfare 
going -on with the Petschenegs. North and w-est, the emperor's 
hands were full. This swift advance of the Turks into country 
that had been so long securely Byzantine must have seemed like 
the approach of final disaster. The Eastern Emperor, Michael 
VII, under the pressure of these convergent dangers, took a 
step that probably seemed both to himself and to Rome of the 
utmost political significance. He appealed to the Pope, Gregory 
VII, for assistance. His appeal was repeated still more urgently 
by his successor, Alexius Comnenus, to Pope Urban II. 

To the counsellors of Rome this must have presented itself 
as a supreme opportunity for the assertion of the headship of 
the Pope over the entire Christian world. 

In this history we have traced the growth of this idea of a 
religious government of Christendom — and through Christen- 
dom of mankind — and we have shown how naturally and how 
necessarily, because of the tradition of world empire, it found 
a centre at Rome. The Pope of Rome was the only Western 
patriarch ; he was the religious head of a vast region in which 
the ruling tongue was Latin ; the other patriarchs of the Ortho- 
dox Church spoke Greek, and so ^vere inaudible throughout his 
domains ; and the tw^o words filio que, which had been added 
to the Latin creed, had split off the Byzantine Christians by 
one of those impalpable and elusive doctrinal points upon which 
there is no reconciliation. (The final rupture "was in 1051.) 
The life of the Lateran changed in its quality with every occu- 
pant of the chair of St. Peter: sometimes papal Rome was a 
den of corruption and uncleanness, as it had been in the days 
of John XII; sometimes it was pervaded by the influence of 
widely thinking and nobly thinking men. But behind the Pope 
was the assembly of the cardinals, priests, and a great number 
of highly educated officials, who never, even in the darkest and 
wildest days, lost sight altogether of the very grand idea of a 
divine world dominion, of a peace of Christ throughout the 
earth that St. Augustine had expressed. Through all the 



638 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Middle Ages that idea was the guiding influence in Kome. For 
a time, perhaps, mean minds would prevail there, and in the 
affairs of the world Eome would plaj the part of a greedy, 
treacherous, and insanely cunning old woman ; followed a phase 
of masculine and qviite worldly astuteness perhaps, or a phase 
of exaltation. Came an interlude of fanaticism or pedanti-y, 
when all the pressure was upon exact doctrine. Or there w^as a 
moral collapse, and the Lateran became the throne of some 
sensuous or aesthetic autocrat, ready to sell every hope or honour 
the church could give for money to spend upon pleasure or 
display. Yet, on the whole, the papal ship kept its course, and 
came presently into the wind again. 

In this period to which we have now come, the period of the 
eleventh century, we discover a Rome dominated by the per- 
sonality of an exceptionally great statesman, Hildebrand, who 
occupied various official positions under a succession of Popes, 
and finally became Pope himself under the name of Gregory 
VII (1073-1085). We find that under his influence, vice, 
sloth, and corruption have been swept out of the church, that 
the method of electing the Popes has been reformed, and that a 
great struggle has been waged with the Emperor upon the mani- 
festly vital question of '^investitures," the question whether 
Pope or temporal monarch should have the decisive voice in 
the appointment of the bishops in their domains. Vital that 
question was not only to the church, but to the monarchs, for 
in many countries more than a quarter of the land was clerical 
property. Hitherto the Roman clergy had been able to marry ; 
but now, to detach them effectually from the world and to make 
them more completely the instruments of the church, celibacy 
was imposed upon all priests.. . . . 

Gregory VII had been prevented by his struggle over the in- 
vestitures from any effectual answer to the first appeal from 
Byzantium ; but he had left a worthy successor in Urban II 
(1087-1099) ; and w^hen the letter of Alexius came to hand, 
Urban seized at once upon the opportunity it afforded for 
drawing together all the thoughts and forces of Western Europe 
into one passion and purpose. Thereby he might hope to end 
the private warfare that prevailed, and find a proper outlet for 
the immense energy of the Kormans. He saw, too, an oppor- 
tunity of thrusting the Byzantine power and Church aside, and 
extending the influence of the Latin Church over Syria, Pales- 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 639 

tine, and Eg^^pt. The envoys of Alexius were heard at a church 
council, hastily summoned at Piazenza (= Placentia), and next 
year (1095) at Clermont, Urban held a second great council, 
in which all the slowly gathered strength of the Church was 
organized for a universal war propaganda against the Moslems. 
Private war, all war among Christians, was to cease until the 
infidel had been swept back and the site of the Holy Sepulchre 
was again in Christian hands. 

The fervour of the response enables us to understand the 
great work of creative organization that had been done in West- 
ern Europe in the previous five centuries. In the beginning 
of the seventh century we saw Western Europe as a chaos of 
social and political fragments, with no common idea nor hope, 
a system shattered almost to a dust of self-seeking individuals. 
Now in the dawn of the eleventh century there is everywhere 
a common belief, a linking idea, to which men may devote them- 
selves, and by which they can co-operate together in a universal 
enterprise. We realize that, in spite of much weakness and 
intellectual and moral unsoundness, to this extent the Christian 
Church has luorl-ed. We are able to measure the evil phases of 
tenth-century Rome, the scandals, the filthiness, the murders 
and violence, at their proper value by the scale of this fact. No 
doubt also all over Christendom there had been many lazy, 
evil, and foolish priests ; but it is manifest that this task of 
teaching and co-ordination that had been accomplished could 
have been accomplished only through a great multitude of right- 
living priests and monks and nuns. A new and greater 
amphictyony, the amphictyony of Christendom, had come into 
the world, and it had been built by thousands of anonymous, 
faithful lives. 

And this response to the appeal of Urban the Second was 
not confined only to what we should call educated people. It 
was not simply knights and princes who were willing to go 
upon this crusade. Side by side with the figure of Urban we 
must put the figure of Peter the Hermit, a type novel to Europe, 
albeit a little reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets. This man 
appeared preaching the crusade to the common people. He 
told a story — whether truthful or untruthful hardly matters in 
this connection — of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, of the wanton 
destruction at the Holy Sepulchre by the Seljuk Turks, who 
took it in 1073, and of the exactions, brutalities, and deliberate 



640 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

cruelties practised upon the Christian pilgrims to the Holy 
Places. Barefooted, clad in a coarse garment, riding on an ass, 
and bearing a huge cross, this man travelled about France and 
Germany, and everywhere harangued vast crowds in church or 
street or market-place. 

Here for the first time we discover Europe with an idea and 
a soul ! Here is a universal response of indignation at the story 
of a remote wrong, a swift understanding of a common cause 
for rich and poor alike. You cannot imagine this thing hap- 
pening in the Empire of Augustus Caesar, or indeed in any 
previous state in the world's history. Something of the kind 
might perhaps have been possible in the far smaller world of 
Hellas, or in Arabia before Islam. But this movement aifected 
nations, kingdoms, tongues, and peoples. It is clear that we 
are dealing with something new that has come into the world, 
a new clear connection of the common interest with the con- 
sciousness of the common man. 

§ 10 

From the very first this flaming enthusiasm was mixed with 
baser elements. There was the cold and calculated scheme of 
the free and ambitious Latin Church to subdue and replace the 
emperor-ruled Byzantine Church ; there was the freebooting in- 
stinct of the Normans, who were tearing Italy to pieces, which 
turned readily enough to a new and richer world of plunder ; 
and there was something in the multitude who now turned their 
faces east, something deeper than love in the human composi- 
tion, namely, fear-born hate, that the impassioned appeals of 
the propagandists and the exaggeration of the horrors and cruel- 
ties of the infidel had fanned into flame. And there was still 
other forces ; the intolerant Seljuks and the intolerant Fatimites 
lay now an impassable barrier across the eastward trade of 
Genoa and Venice that had hitherto flowed through Bagdad 
and Aleppo, or through Egypt. They must force open these 
closed channels, unless Constantinople and the Black Sea route 
were to monopolize Eastern trade altogether. Moreover, in 
1094 and 1095 there had been a pestilence and famine from 
the Scheldt to Bohemia, and there was great social disorganiza- 
tion. "No wonder," says Mr. Earnest Barker, "that a stream of 
emigration set towards the East, such as would in modern times 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 



G41 



flow towards a newly discovered goldfield — a stream carrying' 
in its turbid waters much refuse, tramps and bankrupts, camp- 
followers and hucksters, fugitive monks and escaped villeins, 
and marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever of 



^TVi^p tjy Ulxistvatc die TIR5T CRLE5AD£- 




life, the same alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark 
the rush for a goldfield to-day." 

But these were secondary contributory causes. The fact of 
predominant interest to the historian of mankind is this will 
to crusade suddenly revealed as a new mass possibility in human 
affairs. 

The story of the crusades abounds in such romantic and 
picturesque detail that the writer of an Outline of History must 
ride his pen upon the curb through this alluring field. The 
first forces to move eastward were great crowds of undisciplined 
people rather than armies, and they sought to make their way 
by the valley of the Danube, and thence southward to Con- 



642 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

stantinople. This was the "people's crusade." IN'ever before in 
the whole history of the world had there been such a spectacle 
as these masses of practically leaderless people moved by an 
idea. It was a very crude idea. When they got among for- 
eigners, they do not seem to have realized that they were not 
already among the infidel. Two great mobs, the advance guard 
of the expedition, committed, such excesses in Hungary, where 
the language must have been incomprehensible to them, as to 
provoke the Hungarians to destroy them. They were massa- 
cred. A third host began with a great pogrom of the Jews in 
the Ehineland — for the Christian blood was up — and this multi- 
tude was also dispersed in Hungary. Two other hosts under 
Peter got through and reached Constantinople, to the astonish- 
ment and dismay of the Emperor Alexius. They looted and 
committed outrages as they came, and at last he shipped them 
across the Bosphorus, to be massacred rather than defeated by 
the Seljuks (1096). 

This first unhappy appearance of the "people" as people in 
modern European history was followed in 1097 by the organ- 
ized forces of the First Crusade. They came by diverse routes 
from France, Normandy, Flanders, England, Southern Italy 
and Sicily, and the will and power of them were the Normans. 
They crossed the Bosphorus and captured ]Srica:'a, which 
Alexius snatched away from them before they could loot it. 
They then went by much the same route as Alexander the Great, 
through the Cilician Gates, leaving the Turks in Konia uncon- 
quered, past the battlefield of the Issus, and so to Antioch, 
which they took after nearly a year's siege. Then they defeated 
a great relieving army from Mosul. A large part of the Cru- 
saders remained in Antioch, a smaller force under Godfrey 
of Bouillon (in Belgium) went on to Jerusalem. "After a lit- 
tle more than a month's siege, the city was finally captured 
(Jr.ly 15). The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the con- 
quered ran down the streets, until men splashed in blood as 
they rode. At nightfall, 'sobbing for excess of joy,' the cru- 
saders came to the Sepulchre from their treading of the wine- 
press, and put their blood-stained hands together in prayer. 
So, on that day of July, the First Crusade came to an end." ^ 

The authority of the Patriarch of Jenisalem was at once 
seized upon by the Latin clergy with the expedition, and the 
' E. Barker, art. "Crusades," Encyclopcedia Britannioa. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 643 

Orthodox Christians foinid themselves in rather a worse case 
under Latin rule than nnder the Turk. There were already 
Latin principalities established at Antioch and Edessa, and 
there began a straggle for ascendancy between these various 
courts arid kings, and an unsuccessful attempt to make Jerusa- 
lem a property of the Pope. These are complications beyond 
our present scope. 

Let us quote, however, a characteristic passage from 
Gibbon : — 

"In a style less gTave than that of history, I should perhaps 
compare the Emperor Alexius to the jackal, who is said to fol- 
low the steps and to devour the leavings of the lion. Whatever 
had been his fears and toils in the passage of the First Cru- 
sade, they were amply recompensed by the subsequent benefits 
which he derived from the exploits of the Franks. His dex- 
terity and vigilance secured their first conquest of Nicnea, and 
from this threatening station the Turks were compelled to 
evacuate the neighbourhood of Constantinople. While the Cru- 
saders, with blind valour, advanced into the midland countries 
of Asia, the crafty Greek improved the favourable occasion 
when the emirs of the sea coast were recalled to the standard 
of the Sultan. The Turks were driven from the isles of 
Ehodes and Chios; the cities of Ephesus and Smyrna, of 
Sardes, Philadelphia, and Laodicea were restored to the em- 
pire, which Alexius enlarged from the Hellespont to the banlvs 
of the Marauder and the rocky shores of Pamphylia. The 
churches resumed their splendour ; the towns were rebuilt and 
fortified ; and the desert country was peopled with colonies of 
Christians, who were gently removed from the more distant 
and dangerous frontier. In these paternal cares we may for- 
give Alexius, if we forget the deliverance of the holy sepulchre ; 
but, by the Latins, he was stig-matized with the foul reproach 
of treason and desertion. They had sworn fidelity and obedi- 
ence to his throne ; but he had promised to assist their enter- 
prise in person, or at least, with his troops and treasures; his 
base retreat dissolved their obligations; and the sword, which 
had been the instrument of their victory, was the pledge and 
title of their just independence. It does not appear that the 
emperor attempted to revive his obsolete claims over the king- 
dom of Jerusalem, but the borders of Cilicia and Syria were 
more recent in his possession and more accessible to his arms. 



644 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The great army of the Crusaders was annihilated or dispersed ; 
the principality of Antioch was left without a head, by the sur- 
prise and captivity of Bohemond; his ransom had oppressed 
him with a heavy debt ; and his Norman followers were insuffi- 
cient to repel the hostilities of the Greeks and Turks. In this 
distress, Bohemond embraced a magxianimous resolution, of 
leaving the defence of Antioch to his kinsman, the faithful 
Tancred; of arming the West against the Byzantine Empire, 
and of executing the design which he inherited from the lessons 
and example of his father Guiscard. His embarkation was 
clandestine ; and if we may credit a tale of the Princess Anna, 
he passed the hostile sea closely secreted in a coffin. (Anna 
Comnena adds, that to complete the imitation, he was shut up 
with a dead cock; and condescends to wonder how the bar- 
barian could endure the confinement and putrefaction. This 
absurd tale is unknown to the Latins.) But his reception in 
France was dignified by the public applause and his marriage 
with the king's daughter; his return was glorious, since the 
bravest spirits of the age enlisted under his veteran command ; 
and he repassed the Adriatic at the head of five thousand horse 
and forty thousand foot, assembled from the most remote cli- 
mates of Europe. The strength of Durazzo and prudence of 
Alexius, the progress of famine and approach of winter, eluded 
his ambitious hopes; and the venal confederates were seduced 
from his standard. A treaty of peace suspended the fears of 
the Greeks." 

We have dealt thus lengthily with the First Crusade, because 
it displays completely the quality of all these expeditions. 
The reality of the struggle between the Latin and the Byzantine 
system became more and more nakedly apparent. In 1101 
came reinforcements, in which the fleet of the mercantile re- 
publics of Venice and Genoa played a prominent part, and the 
power of the kingdom of Jerusalem was extended. The year 
1147 saw a Second Crusade, in which both the Emperor Conrad 
III and King Louis of France participated. It was a much 
more stately and far less successful and enthusiastic expedition 
than its predecessor. It had been provoked by the fall of 
Edessa to the Moslems in 1144. One large division of Ger- 
mans, instead of going to the Holy Land, attacked and subju- 
gated the still pagan Wends east of the Elbe. This, the Pope 
agreed, counted as crusading, and so did the capture of Lisbon, 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 645 

and the foundation of the Christian kingdom of Portugal by 
the Flemish and English contingents. 

In 1169 a Kurdish adventurer, named Saladin, became ruler 
of Egypt, in which country the Shiite heresy had now fallen 
before a Sunnite revival. This Saladin reunited the efforts of 
Egypt and Bagdad, and preached a Jehad, a Holy War, a 
counter-crusade, of all the Moslems against the Christians. 
This Jehad excited almost as much feeling in Islam as the 
First Crusade had done in Christendom. It was now a case 
of crusader against crusader; and in 1187 Jerusalem was re- 
taken. This provoked the Third Crusade (1189). This also 
was a grand affair, planned jointly by the Emperor Frederick I 
(known better as Frederick Barbarossa), the King of France, 
and the King of England (who at that time owned many of 
the fairest French provinces). The papacy played a secondary 
part in this expedition ; it was in one of its phases of enfeeble- 
ment ; and the crusade was the most courtly, chivalrous, and 
romantic of all. Religious bitterness was mitigated by the idea 
of knightly gallantry, which obsessed both Saladin and Richard 
I (1189-1199) of England (Coeur-de-Lion), and the lover of 
romance may very well turn to the romances about this period 
for its flavour. The crusade saved the principality of Antioch 
for a time, but failed to retake Jerusalem. The Christians, 
however, remained in possession of the sea-coast of Palestine. 

By the time of the Third Crusade, the magic and wonder 
had gone out of these movements altogether. The common peo- 
ple had found them out. Men went, but only kings and nobles 
straggled back ; and that often only after heavy taxation for 
a ransom. The idea of the crusades was cheapened by their 
too frequent and trivial use. Whenever the Pope quarrelled 
with anyone now, he called for a crusade, until the word ceased 
to mean anything but an attempt to give flavour to an un- 
palatable civil war. There was a crusade against the heretics 
in the south of France, one against John (King of England), 
one against the Emperor Frederick 11. The Popes did not 
understand the necessity of dignity to the papacy. Thoy had 
achieved a moral ascendancy in Christendom. Forthwith they 
began to fritter it away. They not only cheapened the idea of 
the crusades, but they made their tremendous power of ex- 
communication, of putting people outside all the sacraments, 
hopes, and comforts of religion, ridiculous by using it in mere 



646 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

disputes of policy. Frederick II was not only crusaded against, 
but excommunicated — without visible injury. He was excom- 
municated again in 1239, and this sentence was renewed by 
Innocent IV in 1245. 

The bulk of the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy 
Land at all. It started from Venice (1202), captured Zara, 
encamped at Constantinople (1203), and finally, in 1204, 
stormed the city. It was frankly a combined attack on the 
Byzantine Empire. Venice took much of the coasts and islands 
of the empire, and a Latin, Baldwin of Flanders, was set up 
as emperor in Constantinople. The Latin and Greek Churches 
were declared to be reunited, and Latin emperors ruled as con- 
querors in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261. 

In 1212 occurred a dreadful thing, a children's crusade. An 
excitement that could no longer affect sane adults was spread 
among the children in the south of France and in the Ehone 
valley. A crowd of many thousands of French boys marched 
to Marseilles ; they were then lured on board ship by slave 
traders, who sold them into slavery in Egypt. The Rhineland 
children tramped into Italy, many perishing by the way, and 
tliere dispersed. Pope Innocent III made great capital out 
of this strange business. ''The very children put us to shame," 
he said ; and sought to whip up enthusiasm for a Fifth Cru- 
sade. This crusade aimed at the conquest of Egypt, because 
Jerualem was now held by the Egyptian Sultan ; its remnants 
returned in 1221, after an inglorious evacuation of its one 
capture, Damietta, with the Jerusalem vestiges of the True 
Cross as a sort of consolation concession on the part of the 
victor. We have already noted the earlier adventures of this 
venerable relic befo7:e the days of Muhammad when it was 
carried off by Chosroes II to Ctesiphon, and recovered by the 
Emperor Heraclius. Fragments of the True Cross, however, 
had always been in Rome at the church of S. Croce-in-Gerusa- 
lemme, since the days of the Empress Helena (the mother of 
Constantine the Great) to whom, says the legend, its hiding- 
place had been revealed in a vision during her pilgrimage to 
the Holy Land.* 

* "The custody of the True Cross, which on Easter Sunday wag solemnly 
exposed to the people, was entrusted to the Bishop of Jerusalem; and he 
alone might gratify the curious devotion of the pilgrims, by the gift of 
small pieces, which they encased in gold or gems, and carried away in 
triumph to their respective countries. But, as this gainful branch of com- 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 647 

The Sixth Crusade (1229) was a crusade bordering upon 
absurdity. The Emperor Frederick II had promised to go 
upon a crusade, and evaded his vow. He had made a false 
start and returned. He was probably bored by the mere idea 
of a crusade. But the vow had been part of the bargain by 
which he secured the support of Pope Innocent III in his elec- 
tion as emperor. He busied himself in reorganizing the gov- 
ernment of his Sicilian kingdom, though he had given the Pope 
to understand that he would relinquish those possessions if he 
became emperor; and the Pope was anxious to stop this process 
of consolidation by sending him to the Holy Land. The Pope 
did not want Frederick II, or any German emperor at all in 
Italy, because he himself wished to rule Italy. As Frederick 
II remained evasive, Gregory IX excommunicated him, pro- 
claimed a crusade against him, and invaded his dominions in 
Italy (1228). Whereupon the Emperor sailed with an army 
to the Holy Land. There he had a meeting with the Sultan 
of Egypt (the Emperor spoke six languages freely, including 
Ar'abic) ; and it would seem these two gentlemen, both of 
sceptical opinions, exchanged views of a congenial sort, dis- 
cussed the Pope in a worldly spirit, debated the Mongolian rush 
westward, which threatened them both alike, and agreed finally 
to a commercial convention, and the surrender of a part of 
the kingdom of Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed was a 
new sort of crusade, a crusade by private treaty. As this 
astonishing crusader had been excommunicated, he had to in- 
dulge in a purely secular coronation in Jerusalem, taking the 
crown from the altar with his own hand, in a church from 
which all the clergy had gone. Probably there was no one to 
show him the Holy Places; indeed these were presently all 
put under an interdict by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and 
locked up ; manifestly the affair differed altogether in spirit 
from the red onslaught of the First Crusade. It had not even 
the kindly sociability of the Caliph Omar's visit six hundred 
years before. Frederick II rode out of Jerusalem almost alone, 
returned from this unromantic success to Italy, put his affairs 
there in order very rapidly, chased the papal armies out of his 
possessions, and obliged the Pope to give him absolution from 

merce must soon have been annihilated, it was found convenient to sup- 
pose that the marvellous wood possessed a secret power of vegetation, and 
that its substance, though continually diminished, still remained entire 
and unimpaired." — Gibbon. 



648 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

his excommunication (1230). This Sixth Crusade was indeed 
not only the reductio ad absurdum of crusades, but of papal 
excommunications. Of this Frederick II we shall tell more in 
a later section, because he was very typical of certain new 
forces that were coming into European affairs. 

The Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244; it was taken 
from them very easily by the Sultan of Egypt when they at- 
tempted an intrigue against him. This provoked the Seventh 
Crusade, the Crusade of St. Louis, King of France (Louis 
IX), who was taken prisoner in Egypt and ransomed in 1250. 
Not until 1918, when it fell to a mixed force of French, British, 
and Indian troops, did Jerusalem slip once more from the 
Moslem grasp. ... 

One more crusade remains to be noted, an expedition to 
Tunis by this same Louis IX, who died of fever there. 



§ 11 

The essential interest of the crusades for the historian of 
mankind lies in the wave of emotion, of unifying feeling, that 
animated the first. Thereafter these expeditions became more 
and more an established process, and less and less vital events. 
The First Crusade was an occurrence like the discovery of 
America ; the later ones were more and more like a trip across 
the Atlantic. In the eleventh century, the idea of the crusade 
must have been like a strange and wonderful light in the sky ; 
in the thirteenth one can imagine honest burghers saying in 
tones of protest, "What! another crusade!" The experience of 
St. Louis in Egypt is not like a fresh experience for mankind ; 
it is much more like a round of golf over some well-known 
links, a round that was dogged by misfortune. It is an in- 
significant series of events. The interest of life had shifted 
to other directions. 

The beginning of the crusades displays all Europe saturated 
by a naive Christianity, and ready to follow the leading of the 
Pope trustfully and simply. The scandals of the Lateran 
during its evil days, with which we are all so familiar now, 
were practically unknown outside Rome. And Gregory VII 
and Urban II had redeemed all that. But intellectually and 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 649 

morally their successors at the Lateran and the Vatican ^ were 
not equal to their opportunities. The strength of the papacy 
lay in the faith men had in it, and it used that faith so care- 
lessly as to enfeehle it. Rome has always had too much of the 
shrewdness of the priest and too little of the power of the 
prophet. So that while the eleventh century was a century of 
ignorant and confiding men, the thirteenth was an age of know- 
ing and disilhisioned men. It was a far more civilized and 
profoundly sceptical world. 

The bishops, priests, and the monastic institutions of Latin 
Christendom before the days of Gregory VII had been perhaps 
rather loosely linked together and very variable in quality ; but 
it is clear that they were, as a rule, intensely intimate with the 
people among whom they found themselves, and with much of 
the spirit of Jesus still alive in them; they were trusted, and 
they had enormous power within the conscience of their fol- 
lowers. The church, in comparison with its later state, was 
more in the hands of local laymen and the local ruler ; it lacked 
its later universality. The energetic bracing up of the church 
organization by Gregory VII. which was designed to increase 
the central power of Rome, broke many subtle filaments be- 
tween priest and monastery on the one hand, and the country- 
side about them on the other. Men of faith and wisdom be- 
lieve in growth and their fellow men ; but priests, even such 
priests as Gregory VII, believe in the false "efficiency" of an 
imposed discipline. Thi'; squabble over investitures made every 
prince in Christendom suspicious of the bishops as agents of a 
foreign power; this suspicion filtered down to the parishes. 
The political enterprises of the papacy necessitated an increas- 
ing demand for money. Already in the thirteenth century it 
was being said everywhere that the priests were not good men, 
that they were always hunting for money. 

In the days of ignorance there had been an extraordinary 
willingTiess to believe the Catholic priesthood good and wise. 
Relatively it was better and wiser in those days. Great powers 
beyond her spiritual functions had been entrusted to the church, 

•The Popes inhabited tlic pahice of the Lateran until 1305, when a 
French Pope set up the papal court at Avignon. When the Pope returned 
to Rome in 1377 tlie Lateran was almost in ruins, and the palace of the 
Vatican became the seat of the papal court. It was, among other ad- 
vantages, much nearer to the papal stronghold, the Castle of St. Angelo. 



650 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and very extraordinary freedoms. Of this confidence the fullest 
advantage had been taken. In the Middle Ages the church 
had become a state within the state. It had its own law courts. 
Cases involving not merely priests, but monks, students, cru- 
saders, widows, orphans, and the helpless, were reserved for 
the clerical courts; and whenever the rites or rules of the 
church were involved, there the church claimed jurisdiction 
over such matters as wills, marriage, oaths, and of course over 
heresy, sorcery, and blasphemy. There were numerous clerical 
prisons in which offenders might pine all their lives. The 
Pope was the supreme law-giver of Christendom, and his court 
at Kome the final and decisive court of appeal. And the church 
levied taxes ; it had not only vast properties and a great income 
from fees, but it imposed a tax of a tenth, the tithe, upon its 
subjects. It did not call for this as a pious benefaction; it 
demanded it as a right. The clergy, on the other hand, were 
now claiming exemption from lay taxation. 

This attempt to trade upon their peculiar prestige and evade 
their share in fiscal burdens was certainly one very considerable 
factor in the growing dissatisfaction with the clergy. Apart 
from any question of justice, it was impolitic. It made taxes 
seem ten times more burthensome to those who had to pay. It 
made everyone feel the immunities of the church. And a still 
more extravagant and unwise claim made by the church was 
the claim to the power of dispensation. The Pope might in 
many instances set aside the laws of the church in individual 
cases ; he might allow cousins to marry, permit a man to have 
two wives, or release anyone from a vow. But to do such things 
is to admit that the laws affected are not based upon necessity 
and an inherent righteousness ; that they are in fact restrictive 
and vexatious. The law-giver, of all beings, most owes the law 
allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law 
compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind 
that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we 
own. 

§ 12 * 

The Emperor Frederick II is a very convenient example of 
the sort of doubter and rebel the thirteenth century could pro- 
duce. It may be interesting to tell a little of this intelligent 
and cynical man. He was the son of the German Emperor, 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 651 

Henry VI, and grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, and his 
mother was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of 
Sicily. He inherited this kingdom in 1198, when he was four 
years old; his mother was his guardian for six months, and 
when she died, Pope Innocent III (1198 to 1216) became 
regent and guardian. He seems to have had an exceptionally 
good and remarkably mixed education, and his accomplishments 
earned him the flattering title of Stupor mundi, the amazement 
of the world. The result of getting an Arabic view of Chris- 
tianity, and a Christian view of Islam, was to make him believe 
that all religions were impostures, a view held perhaps by many 
a stifled observer in the Age of Faith. But he talked about 
his views ; his blasphemies and heresies are on record. Growing 
up under the arrogant rule of Innocent III, who never seems to 
have realized that his ward had come of age, he developed a 
slightly humorous evasiveness. It was the papal policy to pre- 
vent any fresh coalescence of the power of Germany and Italy, 
and it was equally Frederick's determination to get whatever 
he could. When presently opportunity offered him the im- 
perial crown of Germany, he secured the Pope's support by 
agreeing, if he were elected, to relinquish his possessions in 
Sicily and South Italy, and to put down heresy in Germany. 
For Innocent III was one of the great persecuting Popes, an 
able, grasping, and aggressive man. (For a Pope, he was ex- 
ceptionally young. He became Pope at thirty-seven.) It was 
Innocent who had preached a cruel crusade against the heretics 
in the south of France, a crusade that presently became a loot- 
ing expedition beyond his control. So soon as Frederick was 
elected emperor (1211),' Innocent pressed for the performance 
of the vows and promises he had wrung from his dutiful ward. 
The clergy were to be free from lay jurisdiction and from taxa- 
tion, and exemplary cruelties were to be practised upon the 
heretics. None of which things Frederick did. As we have 
already told, he would not even relinquish Sicily. He liked 
Sicily as a place of residence better than he liked Germany. 

Innocent III died bafiled in 1216, and his successor, Honorius 
III, effected nothing. Honorius was succeeded by Gregory IX 
(1227), who evidently came to the papal throne with a nervous 
resolution to master this perplexing young man. He excom- 

*He was crowned emperor in 1220 by Honorius III, the successor of 
Innocent. 



652 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

municated him at once for failing; to start upon his crusade, 
which was now twelve years overdue ; and he denounced his 
vices, heresies, and general offences in a public letter (1227). 
To this Frederick replied in a far abler document addressed 
to all the princes of Europe, a document of extreme importance 
in history, because it is the first clear statement of the issue 
between the pretensions of the Pope to be absolute ruler of all 
Christendom, and the claims of the secular rulers.^ This con- 
flict had always been smouldering; it had broken out here in 
one form, and there in another; but now Frederick put it in 
clear general terms upon which men could combine together. 

Having delivered this blow, he departed upon the pacific 
crusade of which we have already told. In 1239, Gregory IX 
was excommunicating him for a second time, and renewing that 
warfare of public abuse in which the papacy had already 
suffered severely. The controversy was revived after Gregory 
IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope ; and again a devas- 
tating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written 
by Frederick against the church. He denounced the pride and 
irreligion of the clergy, and ascribed all the corruptions of the 
time to their pride and wealth. He proposed to his fellow 
princes a general confiscation of church property — for the good 
of the church. It was a suggestion that never afterwards left 
the imagination of the European princes. 

We will not go on to tell of his last years or of the disaster 
at Parma, due to his carelessness, which cast a shadow of failure 
over his end. The particular events of his life are far less 
significant than its general atmosphere. It is possible to piece 
together something of his court life in Sicily. Ho is described 
towards the end of his life as "red, bald, and short-sighted" ; 
but his features were good and pleasing. He was luxurious in 
his way of living, and fond of beautiful thing. He is described 
as licentious. But it is clear that his mind was not satisfied 
by religious scepticism, and that he was a man of very effectual 
curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as 
well as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to 
irrigate the Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through 
him Arabic numerals and algebra were introduced to Christian 
students, and among other philosophers at his court was Michael 
' Some authorities deny his authorship of this letter. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 653 

Scott, who translated portions of Aristotle and the commen- 
taries thereon of the great Arab philosopher Averroes (of Cor- 
doba). In 1224 Frederick founded the University of Naples, 
and he enlarged and enriched the great medical school at Salerno 
University, the most ancient of universities. He also founded 
a zoological garden. He left a book on hawking, which shows 
him to have been an acute observer of the habits of birds, and 
he was one of the first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian 
poetry was indeed bom at his court. He has been called by an 
able writer, "the first of the moderns," and the phrase expresses 
aptly the unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual side. His 
was an all-round originality. During a gold shortage he intro- 
duced and made a success of a coinage of stamped leather, 
bearing his promise to pay in gold, a sort of leather bank-note 
issue. ^ 

In spite of the torrent of abuse and calumny in which Fred- 
erick was drenched, he left a profound impression upon the 
popular imagination. He is still remembered in South Italy 
almost as vividly as is Napoleon I by the peasants of France; 
he is the ''Gran Federigo." And German scholars declare that, 
in spite of Frederick's manifest dislike for Germany, it is he, 
and not Frederick I, Frederick Barbarossa, to whom that Ger- 
man legend originally attached — that legend which represents 
a great monarch slumbering in a deep cavern, his beard grown 
round a stone table, against a day of awakening when the world 
will be restored by him from an extremity of disorder to peace. 
Afterwards, it seems, the story was transferred to the Crusader 
Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II. 

A difficult child was Frederick II for Mother Church, and 
he was only the precursor of many such difficult children. The 
princes and educated gentlemen throughout Europe read his 
letters and discussed them. The more enterprising university 
students found, marked, and digested the Arabic Aristotle he 
had made accessible to them in Latin. Salerno cast a baleful 
light upon Rome. All sorts of men must have been impressed 
by the futility of the excommunications and interdicts that were 
levelled at Frederick. 

^ Perhaps parchment rather than leather. Such promises on parchment 
were also xised by the Carthasrinians. Was Frederick's money an in- 
heritance from an old tradition living on in Sicily since Carthaginian 
times?— E. B. 



654 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

§ 13 

We have said that Innocent III never seemed to realize that 
his ward, Frederick II, was growing up. It is equally true that 
the papacy never seemed to realize that Europe was growing up. 
It is impossible for an intelligent modern student of history 
not to sympathize with the underlying idea of the papal court, 
with the idea of one universal rule of righteousness keeping 
the peace of the earth, and not to recognize the many elements 
of nobility that entered into the Lateran policy. Sooner or 
later mankind must come to one universal peace, unless our 
race is to be destroyed by the increasing power of its own de- 
structive inventions ; and that universal peace must needs take 
the form of a government, that is to say a law-sustaining organi- 
zation, in the best sense of the word religious; a government 
ruling men through the educated co-ordination of their minds 
in a common conception of human history and human destiny. 

The papacy we must now recognize as the first clearly con- 
scious attempt to provide such a government in the world. We 
cannot too earnestly examine its deficiencies and inadequacies, 
for every lesson we can draw from them is necessarily of the 
greatest value to us in forming our ideas of our own interna- 
tional relationships. We have tried to suggest the main factors 
in the breakdown of the Eoman Republic, and it now behoves 
us to attempt a diagnosis of the failure of the Roman Church 
to secure and organize the good will of mankind. 

The first thing that will strike the student is the intermittence 
of the efforts of the church to establish the world City of God. 
The policy of the church was not whole-heartedly and continu- 
ously set upon that end. It was only now and then that some 
fine personality or some group of fine personalities dominated it 
in that direction. The kingdom of God that Jesus of Nazareth 
had preached was overlaid, as we have explained, almost from 
the beginning by the doctrines and ceremonial traditions of an 
earlier age, and of an intellectually inferior type. Christianity 
almost from its commencement ceased to be purely prophetic 
and creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of 
human sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft 
as ancient as human society, and with elaborate doctrines about 
the stnicture of the divinity. The gory forefinger of the 
Etruscan pontifex maximus emphasized the teachings of Jesus 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 655 

of Nazareth ; the mental complexity of the Alexandrian Greek 
entangled them. In the inevitable jangle of these incompatibles 
the church had become dogmatic. In despair of other solutions 
to its intellectual discords it had resorted to arbitrary authority. 
Its priests and bishops were more and more men moulded to 
creeds and dogmas and set procedures ; by the time they became 
cardinals or popes they were usually oldish men, habituated 
to a politic struggle for immediate ends and no longer capable 
of world-wide views. They no longer wanted to see the King- 
dom of God established in the hearts of men — they had for- 
gotten about that ; they wanted to see the power of the church, 
which was their own power, dominating men. They were pre- 
pared to bargain even with the hates and fears and lusts in 
men's hearts to ensure that power. And it was just because 
many of them probably doubted secretly of the entire sound- 
ness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric, that they 
would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of ques- 
tions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but 
because they were not. They wanted conformity for reasons 
of policy. By the thirteenth century the church was evidently 
already morbidly anxious about the gnawing doubts that might 
presently lay the whole structure of its pretensions in ruins. 
It had no serenity of soul. It was hunting everywhere for 
heretics as timid old ladies are said to look under beds and in 
cupboards for burglars before retiring for the night. 

We have already mentioned the Persian Mani, who was 
crucified and flayed in the year 277. His way of representing 
the struggle between good and evil was as a struggle between a 
power of light which was, as it were, in rebellion against a 
power of darkness inherent in the universe. All these profound 
mysteries are necessarily represented by symbols and poetic 
expressions, and the ideas of Mani still find a response in many 
intellectual temperaments to-day. One may hear Manichsean 
doctrines from many Christian pulpits. But the orthodox 
Catholic symbol was a different one. These Manichfean ideas 
had spread very widely in Europe, and particularly in Bul- 
garia and the south of France In the south of France the 
people who held them were called the Cathars or Albigenses. 
Their ideas jarred so little with the essentials of Christianity, 
that they believed themselves to be devout Christians. As a 
body they lived lives of conspicuous virtue and purity in a 



656 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

violent, undisciplined, and vicious age. But they questioned 
the doctrinal soundness of Rome and the orthodox interpreta- 
tion of the Bible. They thought Jesus was a rebel against the 
cruelty of the God of the Old Testament, and not his harmoni- 
ous son. Closely associated with the Albigenses were the 
Waldenses, the followers of a man called Waldo, who seems to 
have been quite soundly Catholic in his theology, but equally 
offensive to the church because he denounced the riches and 
luxury of the clergy. This was enough for the Lateran, and 
so we have the spectacle of Innocent III preaching a crusade 
against these unfortunate sectaries, and permitting the enlist- 
ment of every wandering scoundrel at loose ends to carry fire 
and sword and rape and every conceivable outrage among the 
most peaceful subjects of the King of France. The accounts 
of the cruelties and abominations of this crusade are far more 
terrible to read than any account of Christian martyrdoms by 
the pagans, and they have the added horror of being indis- 
putably true. 

This black and pitiless intolerance was an evil spirit to be 
mixed into the project of a rule of God on earth. This was 
a spirit entirely counter to that of Jesus of Nazareth. We 
do not hear of his smacking the faces or wringing the wrists 
of recalcitrant or unresponsive disciples. But the Popes during 
their centuries of power were always raging against the slightest 
reflection upon the intellectual sufficiency of the church. 

And the intolerance of the church was not confined to re- 
ligious matters. The shrewd, pompous, irascible, and rather 
malignant old men who manifestly constituted a dominant ma- 
jority in the councils of the church resented any knowledge 
but their own knowledge, and distrusted any thought at all that 
they did not correct and control. They set themselves to re- 
strain science, of which they were evidently jealous. Any 
mental activity but their own struck them as being insolent. 
Later on they were to have a great struggle upon the question 
of the earth's position in space, and whether it moved round 
the sun or not. This was really not the business of the church 
at all. She might very well have left to reason the things that 
are reason's, but she seems to have been impelled by an inner 
necessity to estrange the intellectual conscience in men. 

Had this intolerance sprung from a real intensity of convic- 
tion it would have been bad enough, .but it was accompanied 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 657 

by a scarcely disguised contempt for the intelligence and mental 
dignity of the common man that makes it far less acceptable 
to our modern judgments, and which no doubt made it far 
less acceptable to the free spirits of the time. We have told 
quite dispassionately the policy of the Roman church towards 
her troubled sister in the East. Many of the tools and ex- 
pedients she used were abominable. In her treatment of her 
own people a streak of real cynicism is visible. She destroyed 
her prestige by disregarding her own teaching of righteousness. 
Of dispensations we have already spoken (§ 11). Her crown- 
ing folly in the sixteenth century was the sale of indulgences, 
whereby the sufferings of the soul in purgatory could be com 
muted for a money payment. But the spirit that led at last 
to this shameless and, as it proved, disastrous proceeding, was 
already very evident in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 

Long before the seed of criticism that Frederick II had sown 
had germinated in men's minds and produced its inevitable 
crop of rebellion, there was apparent a strong feeling in Chris- 
tendom that all was not well with the spiritual atmosphere. 
There began movements, movements that nowadays we should 
call "revivalist," within the church, that implied rather than 
uttered a criticism of the sufficiency of her existing methods 
and organization. Men sought fresh forms of righteous living 
outside the monasteries and priesthood. One notable figure is 
that of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). We cannot tell here 
in any detail of how this pleasant young gentleman gave up all 
the amenities and ease of his life and went forth to seek God ; 
the opening of the story is not unlike the early experiences 
of Gautama Buddha. He had a sudden conversion in the midst 
of a life of pleasure, and, taking a vow of extreme poverty, he 
gave himself up to an imitation of the life of Christ, and to 
the service of the sick and wretched, and more particularly to 
the service of the lepers, who then abounded in Italy. He was 
joined by great multitudes of disciples, and so the first Friars 
of the Franciscan Order came into existence. An order of 
women devotees was set up beside the original confraternity, 
and in addition great numbers of men and women were brought 
into less formal association. He preached, unmolested by the 
Moslems, be it noted, in Egypt and Palestine, though the Fifth 
Crusade was then in progress. His relations with the church 
are still a matter for discussion. His work had been sanctioned 



658 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

by Pope Innocent III, but while he was in the East there was 
a reeonstitution of his order, intensifying its discipline and 
substituting authority for responsive impulse, and as a conse- 
quence of these changes he resigned its headship. To the end 
he climg passionately to the ideal of poverty, but he was hardly 
dead before the order was holding property through trustees 
and building a great church and monastery to his memory at 
Assisi. The disciplines of the order that were applied after 
his death to his immediate associates are scarcely to be distin- 
guished from a persecution; several of the more conspicuous 
zealots for simplicity were scourged, others were imprisoned, 
one was killed while attempting to escape, and Brother Bernard, 
the "first disciple," passed a year in the woods and hills, hunted 
like a wild beast. 

This struggle within the Franciscan Order is a very interest- 
ing one, because it foreshadows the great troubles that were 
coming to Christendom. All through the thirteenth century a 
section of the Franciscans were straining at the rule of the 
church, and in 1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marseilles 
as incorrigible heretics. There seems to have been little differ- 
ence between the teaching and spirit of St. Francis and that of 
Waldo in the twelfth century, the founder of the murdered 
sect of Waldenses. Both were passionately enthusiastic for the 
spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. But while Waldo rebelled against 
the church, St. Francis did his best to be a good child of the 
church, and his comment on the spirit of official Christianity 
was only implicit. But both were instances of an outbreak of 
conscience against authority and the ordinary procedure of the 
church. And it is plain that in the second instance, as in the 
first, the church scented rebellion. 

A very different character to St. Francis was the Spaniard 
St. Dominic (1170-1221), who was, of all things, orthodox. 
He had a passion for the argumentative conversion of heretics, 
and he was commissioned by Pope Innocent III to go and 
preach to the Albigenses. His work went on side by side with 
the fighting and massacres of the crusade ; whom Dominic could 
not convert, Innocent's crusaders slew ; yet his very activities 
and the recognition and encouragement of his order by the Pope 
witness to the rising tide of discussion, and to the persuasion 
even of the papacy that force was no remedy. In several re- 
spects the development of the Black Friars or Dominicans — 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 659 

the Franciscans were the Grey Friars — shows the Eoman 
church at the parting of the ways, committing itself more and 
more deeply to organized dogma, and so to a hopeless conflict 
with the quickening intelligence and courage of mankind. She 
whose one duty was to lead, chose to compel. The last discourse 
of St. Dominic to the heretics he had sought to convert is pre- 
served to us. It is a signpost in history. It betrays the fatal 
exasperation of a man who has lost his faith in the power of 
truth because his truth has not prevailed. "For many years," 
he said, "I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preach- 
ing, praying, and weeping. But according to the proverb of 
my country, Vhere blessing can accomplish nothing, blows 
may avail.' We shall rouse against you princess and prelates, 
who, alas ! will arm nations and kingdoms against this land . . . 
and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have 
been powerless;" * 

The thirteenth century saw the development of a new institu- 
tion in the church, the papal Inqviisition. Before this time it 
had been customary for the Pope to make occasional inquests 
or inquiries into heresy in this region or that, but now Innocent 
III saw in the new order of the Dominicans a powerful instru- 
ment of suppression. The Inquisition was organized as a 
standing inquiry under their direction, and with fire and tor- 
ment the church set itself, through this instrument, to assail 
and weaken the human conscience in which its sole hope of 
world dominion resided. Before the thirteenth century the 
penalty of death had been inflicted but rarely upon heretics and 
unbelievers. iNow in a hundred market-places in Europe the 
dignitaries of the church watched the blackened bodies of its 
antagonists, for the most part, poor and insignificant people, 
bum and sink pitifully, and their own great mission to man- 
kind burn and sink with them into dust and ashes. 

The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans were 
but two among many of the new forces that were arising in 
Christendom, either to help or shatter the church, as its own 
wisdom might decide. Those two orders the church did assimi- 
late and use, though with a little violence in the case of the 
former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and 
critical. A century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320- 
1384). He was a learned doctor at Oxford; for a time he was 
* Enoyclopwdia Britannica, art. "Dominic." 



660 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Master of Balliol; and he held various livings in the church. 
Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken criticisms 
of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom of the church. 
He organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites, to 
spread his ideas throughout England ; and in order that people 
should judge between the church and himself, he translated 
the Bible into English. He was a more learned and far abler 
man than either St. Francis or St. Dominic. He had sup- 
porters in high places and a great following among the people ; 
and though Rome raged against him, and ordered his imprison- 
ment, he died a free man, still administering the Sacraments 
as parish priest of Lutterworth. But the black and ancient 
spirit that was leading the Catholic church to its destruction 
would not let his bones rest in his grave. By a decree of the 
Council of Constance in 1415, his remains were ordered to be 
dug up and burnt, an order which was carried out at the com- 
mand of Pope ]\rartin V by Bishop Fleming in 1428. This 
desecration was not the act of some isolated fanatic; it was 
the official act of the church. 

§ 14 

The history of the papacy is confusing to the general reader 
because of the multitude and abundance of the Popes. They 
mostly began to reign as old men, and their reigns were short, 
averaging less than two years each. But certain of the Popes 
stand out and supply convenient handles for the student to 
grasp. Such were Gregory I (590-604) the Great, the first 
monkish Pope, the friend of Benedict, the sender of the English 
mission. Other noteworthy Popes are Leo III (795-816), who 
crowned Charlemagne, the scandalous Popes John XL (931- 
936) and John XIT (955-963), which latter was deposed by 
the Emperor Otto I, and the great Hildebrand, who ended his 
days as Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), and who did so much 
by establishing the celibacy of the clergy, and insisting upon 
the supremacy of the church over kings and princes, to cen- 
tralize the power of the church in Pome. There was a great 
struggle between Hildebrand and the Emperor elect Henry IV 
upon the question of investitures. The emperor attempted to 
depose the pope; the pope excommunicated the emperor and 
released his subjects from their allegiance. The emperor was 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 661 

obliged to go in penitence to the pope at Cauossa and to await 
forgiveness for tliree days and nights in the courtyard of the 
castle, clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the snow. The next 
Pope but one after Gregory VII was Urban II ( 1087-1099 j, 
the Pope of the First Crusade. The period from the time of 
Gregory VII onward for a century and a half, was the great 
period of ambition and effort for the church. There was a real 
sustained attempt to unite all Christendom under a purified and 
reorganized church. 

The setting up of Latin kingdoms in Syria and the Holy 
Land, in religious communion with Rome, after the First Cru- 
sade, marked the opening stage of a conquest of Eastern Chris- 
tianity by Rome that reached its climax during the Latin rule 
in Constantinople (1201-1261). 

In 1176, at Venice, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa 
(Frederick I) knelt to the Pope Alexander III, recognized his 
spiritual supremacy, and swore fealty to him. But after the 
death of Alexander III, in 1181, the peculiar weakness of the 
papacy, its liability to fall to old and enfeebled men, became 
manifest. Five Popes tottered to the Lateran to die within the 
space of ten years. Only with Innocent III (1198-1216) did 
another vigorous Pope take up the great policy of the City of 
God. 

Under Innocent III, the giuirdian of that Emperor Frederick 
II, whose career we have already studied in §§ 10 and 12, and 
the five Popes who followed him, the Pope of Rome came nearer 
to being the monarch of a united Christendom than he had ever 
been before, and was ever to be again. The empire was weak- 
ened by internal dissensions, Constantinople was in Latin 
hands, from Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norv/ay to Sicily 
and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Yet this supremacy was 
more apparent than real. For, as we have seen, while in the 
time of Urban the power of faith was strong in all Christian 
Europe, in the time of Innocent III the papacy had lost its 
hold upon the hearts of princes, and the faith and conscience 
of the common people was turning against a merely political 
and aggressive church. 

The church in the thirteenth century was extendiug its legal 
power in the world, and losing its grip upon men's consciences. 
It was becoming less persuasive and more violent. No intelli- 
gent man can tell of this process, or read of this process of failure 



662 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

without very mingled feelings. The church had sheltered and 
formed a new Europe throughout the long ages of European 
darkness and chaos ; it had been the matrix in which the new 
civilization had been cast. But this new-formed civilization 
was impelled to grow by its own inherent vitality, and the 
church lacked sufficient power of growth and accommodation. 
The time was fast approaching when this matrix was to be 
broken. 

The first striking intimation of the decay of the living and 
sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the 
Popes came into conflict with the growing power of the French 
king. During the lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Ger- 
many fell into disunion, and the French king began to play the 
role of guard, supporter, and rival to the Pope that had hitherto 
fallen to the Hohenstaufen emperors. A series of Popes pur- 
sued the policy of supporting the French monarchs. French 
princes were established in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, 
with the support and approval of Rome, and the French kings 
saw before them the possibility of restoring and ruling the 
Empire of Charlemagne. When, however, the German inter- 
regnum after the death of Frederick II, the last of the Hohen- 
staufens, came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was elected 
first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of the Lateran 
began to fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about 
with the sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in 
1261 the Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latin 
emperors, and the founder of the new Greek dynasty, Michael 
Pala?ologus, Michael VIII, after some unreal tentatives of 
reconciliation with the Pope, broke aveay from the Roman com- 
munion altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin king- 
doms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to 
an end. 

In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, 
hostile to the French, and full of a sense of the great traditions 
and mission of Rome. For a time he carried things with a 
high hand. In 1300 he held a jubilee, and a vast multitude of 
pilgrims assembled in Rome. "So great was the influx of 
money into the papal treasury, that two assistants were kept 
busy with rakes collecting the offerings that were deposited at 
the tomb of St. Peter." ^ But this festival was a delusive tri- 
* J. H. Robinson. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 663 

iimpli. It is easier to raise a host of excursionists than a band 
of crusaders. Boniface came into conflict with the French king 
in 1302, and in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of 
excommunication against that monarch, he was surprised and 
arrested in his own ancestral palace, at Anagni, by Guillaume 
de Nogaret. This agent from the French king forced an en- 
trance into the palace, made his way into the bedroom of the 
frightened Pope — he was lying in bed with a cross in his hands 
— and heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope was 
liberated a day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to 
Rome ; but there he was seized upon and again made prisoner 
by the Orsini family, and in a few weeks' time the shocked and 
disillusioned old man died a prisoner in their hands. 

The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose 
against Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the 
Pope's native town. The important point to note is that the 
French king, in this rough treatment of the head of Christen- 
dom, was acting with the full approval of his people; he had 
summoned a council of the Three Estates of France (lords, 
church, and commons) and gained their consent before pro- 
ceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany, nor Eng- 
land was there the slightest general manifestation of disap- 
proval at this free handling of the sovereign pontiff. The idea 
of Christendom had decayed until its power over the minds of 
men had gone. 

Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing 
to recover its moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, 
was a Frenchman, the choice of King Philip of France. He 
never came to Rome. H© set up his court in the town of 
Avignon, which then belonged not to France, but to the Papal 
See, though embedded in French territory, and there his succes- 
sors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to 
the Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the 
sympathies of the whole church with him. Many of the cardi- 
nals were of French origin, and their habits and associations 
were rooted deep at Avignon. When in 1378 Gregory XI died, 
and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these dissentient cardi- 
nals declared the election invalid, and elected another Pope, 
the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called the Great 
Schism. The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti- 
French powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary, 



664 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Poland, and the North of Europe were loyal to them. The 
anti-Popes, on the other hand, continued in Avignon, and were 
supported by the King of France, his ally the King of Scotland, 
Spain, Portugal, and various German princes. Each Pope 
excommunicated and cursed the adherents of his rival, so that 
by one standard or another all Christendom was damned during 
this time (1378-1417). The lamentable effect of this split 
upon the solidarity of Christendom it is impossible to ex- 
aggerate. Is it any marvel that such men as Wycliffe began to 
teach men to think on their own account when the fountain 
of truth thus squirted against itself? In 1417 the Great Schism 
was healed at the Council of Constance, the same council that 
dug up and burnt Wycliffe's bones, and which, as we shall tell 
later, caused the burning of John Huss; at this council. Pope 
and anti-Pope resigned or were swept aside, and Martin V 
became the sole Pope of a formally reunited but spiritually 
very badly strained Christendom. 

How later on the Council of Basle (1437) led to a fresh 
schism, and to further anti-Popes, we cannot relate here. 

Such, briefly, is the story of the great centuries of papal 
ascendancy and papal decline. It is the story of the failure to 
achieve the very noble and splendid idea of a unified and re- 
ligious world. We have pointed out in the previous section how 
greatly the inheritance of a complex dogmatic theology en- 
cumbered the church in this its ambitious adventure. It had 
too much theology, and not enough religion. But it may not 
be idle to point out here how much the individual insufficiency 
of the Popes also contributed to the collapse of its scheme and 
dignity. There was no such level of education in the world 
as to provide a succession of cardinals and popes with the 
breadth of knowledge and outlook needed for the task they had 
undertaken ; they were not sufficiently educated for their task, 
and only a few, by sheer force of genius, transcended that defect. 
And, as we have already pointed out, they were, when at last 
they got to power, too old to use it. Before they could grasp the 
situation they had to control, most of them were dead. It 
would be interesting to speculate how far it would have tilted the 
balance in favour of the church if the cardinals had retired at 
fifty, and if no one could have been elected Pope after fifty-five. 
This would have lengthened the average reign of each Pope, and 
enormously increased the continuity of the policy of the church. 



CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES 665 

And it is perhaps possible that a more perfect system of select- 
ing the cardinals, who were the electors and counsellors of the 
Pope, might have been devised. The rules and ways by which 
men reach power are of very great importance in human affairs. 
The psychology of the ruler is a science that has still to be 
properly studied. We have seen the Roman Republic wrecked, 
and here we see the church failing in its world mission very 
largely through ineffective electoral methods. 



XXXIII 

THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND 
HIS SUCCESSORS 

(The Age of the Land Ways) 

1. Asm at the End of the Twelfth Century. § 2. The Rise 
and Victories of the Mongols. § 3. The Travels of Marco 
Polo. § 4. The Ottoman TurJcs and Constantinople. § 5. 
Why the Mongols Were Not Christianized. § 5a. Kublai 
Khan. Founds the Yuan Dynasty. § 5b. The Mongols Re- 
vert to Tribalism. § 5c. The KipchaJc Empire and the Tsar 
of Muscovy. § 5d. Timurlane. § 5e. The Mongol Empire 
of India. § 5f. The Mongols and the Gipsies. 



WE have to tell now of the last and greatest of all the 
raids of nomadism upon the civilizations of the East 
and West. We have traced in this history the de- 
velopment side by side of these two ways of living, and we 
have pointed out that as the civilizations grew more extensive 
and better organized, the arms, the mobility, and the intelli- 
gence of the nomads also improved. The nomad was not simply 
an uncivilized man, he was a man specialized and specializing 
along his own line. From the very beginning of history the 
nomad and the settled people have been in reaction. We have 
told of the Semitic and Elamite raids upon Sumeria; we have 
seen the Western empire smashed by the nomads of the great 
plains and Persia conquered and Byzantium shaken by the 
nomads of Arabia. Whenever civilization seems to be choking 
amidst its weeds of wealth and debt and servitude, when its 
faiths seem rotting into cynicism and its powers of further 
growth are hopelessly entangled in effete formulae, the nomad 
drives in like a plough to break up the festering stagnation and 
release the world to new beginnings. The Mongol aggression, 
which began with the thirteenth century, was the greatest, and 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 667 

so far it has been the last, of all these destructive reploughings 
of human association. 

From entire obscurity the Mongols came very suddenly into 
history towards the close of the twelfth century. They ap- 
peared in the country to the north of China, in the land of 
origin of the Huns and Turks, and they were manifestly of 
the same strain as these peoples. They were gathered together 
under a chief, with whose name we will not tax the memory 
of the reader ; under his son Jengis Khan their power grew 
with extraordinary swiftness. 

The reader will already have an idea of the gradual breaking 
up of the original unity of Islam. In the beginning of the 
thirteenth century there were a number of separate and dis- 
cordant Moslem states in Western Asia. There was Egypt 
(with Palestine and much of Syria) under the successors of 
Saladin, there was the Seljuk power in Asia Minor, there was 
still an Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, and to the east of this 
again there had grown up a very considerable empire, the 
Kharismian empire, that of the Turkish princes from Khiva 
who had conquered a number of fragmentary Seljuk principali- 
ties and reigned from the Ganges valley to the Tigris. They 
had but an insecure hold on the Persian and Indian populations. 

The state of the Chinese civilization was equally inviting to 
an enterprising invader. One last glimpse of China in this his- 
tory was in the seventh century during the opening years of the 
Tang dynasty, when that shrewd and able emperor Tai-tsung 
was weighing the respective merits of Nestorian Christianity, 
Islam, Buddhism, and the teachings of Lao Tse, and on the 
whole inclining to the opinion that Lao Tse was as good a 
teacher as any. We have described his reception of the traveller 
Yuan Chwangj Tai-tsung tolerated all religions, but several 
of his successors conducted a pitiless persecution of the Buddhist 
faith ; it flourished in spite of these persecutions, and its monas- 
teries played a somewhat analogous part in at first sustaining 
learning and afterwards retarding it, that the Christian 
monastic organization did in the West. By the tenth century 
the great Tang dynasty was in an extreme state of decay; the 
usual degenerative process through a series of voluptuaries and 
incapables had gone on, and China broke up again politically 
into a variable number of contending states, "The age of the 
Ten States," an age of confusion that lasted through the first 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 669 

half of the tenth century. Then arose a dynasty, the Northern 
Sung (9G0-1127), which established a sort of unity, but which 
was in constant struggle with a number of Hunnish peoples 
from the north who were pressing down the eastern coast. For 
a time one of these peoples, the Khitan, prevailed. In the 
twelfth century these people had been subjugated and had given 
place to anotlicr Ilunuish empire, the empire of the Kin, with 
its capital at Pckin and its southern boundary south of Hwang- 
ho. The Sung empire shrank before this Kin empire. In 1138 
the capital was shifted from Nankin, which was now too close 
to the northern frontier, to the city of Han Chau on the coast. 
From 1127 onward to 1295, the Sung dynasty is known as the 
Southern Sung. To the north-west of its territories there was 
now the Tartar empire of the Hsia ; to the north, the Kin em- 
pire, both states in which the Chinese population was under 
rulers in whom nomadic traditions were still strong. So that 
here on the east also the main masses of Asiatic mankind were 
under uncongenial rulers and ready to accept, if not to welcome, 
the arrival of a conqueror. 

Northern India we have already noted was also a conquered 
country at the opening of the thirteenth century. It was at 
first a part of the Khivan empire, but in 1206 an adventurous 
ruler, Kutub, who had been a slave and who had risen as a slave 
to be governor of the Indian province, set up a separate Mos- 
lem state of Hindustan in Delhi. Brahminism had long since 
ousted Buddhism from India, but the converts to Islam were 
still but a small ruling minority in the land. 

Such was the political state of Asia when Jengis Khan began 
to consolidate his power among the nomads in the country 
between Lakes Balkash and Baikal in the beginning of the 
thirteenth century. 



The career of conquest of Jengis Khan and his immediate 
successors astounded the world, and probably astounded no one 
more than these Mongol Khans themselves. 

The Mongols were in the twelfth century a tribe subject to 
those Kin who had conquered North-east China. They were a 
horde of nomadic horsemen living in tents, and subsisting mainly 
upon mare's milk products and meat. Their occupations were 



670 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

pasturage and hunting, varied by war. They drifted north- 
ward as the snows melted for summer pasture, and southward 
to winter pasture after the custom of the steppes. Their mili- 
tary education began with a successful insurrection against 
the Kin. The empire of Kin had the resources of half China 
behind it, and in the struggle the Mongols learnt very much 
of the military science of the Chinese. By the end of the 
twelfth century they were already a fighting tribe of excep- 
tional quality. 

The opening years of the career of Jengis were spent in de- 
veloping his military machine, in assimilating the Mongols and 
the associated tribes about them into one organized army. His 
first considerable extension of power was westward, when the 
Tartar Kirghis and the Uigurs (who were the Tartar people of 
the Tarim basin) were not so much conquered as induced to 
join his organization. ITe then attacked the Kin empire 
and took Pekin (1214). The Khitan people, who had been so 
recently subdued by the Kin, threw in their fortunes with his, 
and were of very great help to him. The settled Chinese 
population went on sowing and reaping and trading during this 
change of masters without lending its weight to either side. 

We have already mentioned the very recent Kharismian em- 
pire of Turkestan, Persia, and North India. This empire ex- 
tended eastward to Kashgar, and it must have seemed one of the 
most progressive and hopeful empires of the time. Jengis 
Khan, while still engaged in this war with the Kin empire, 
sent envoys to Kharismia. They were put to death, an almost 
incredible stupidity. The Kharismian government, to use the 
political jargon of to-day, had decided not to "recognize" Jengis 
Khan, and took this spirited course with him. Thereupon 
(1218) the great host of horsemen that Jengis Khan had con- 
solidated and disciplined swept over the Pamirs and down 
into Turkestan. It was well armed, and probably it had some 
guns and gunpowder for siege work — for the Chinese were cer- 
tainly using gimpowder at this time, and the Mongols learnt 
its use from them. Kashgar, Khokand, Bokhara fell and then 
Samarkand, the capital of the Kharismian empire. There- 
after nothing held the Mongols in the Kharismian territories. 
They swept westward to the Caspian, and southward as far as 
Lahore, To the north of the Caspian a Mongol army en- 
countered a Kussian force from Kieff. There was a series of 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 



671 




672 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

battles, in which the Russian armies were finally defeated and 
the Grand Duke of Kielf taken prisoner. So it was the Mon- 
gols appeared on the northern shores of the Black Sea. A 
panic swept Constantinople, which set itself to reconstruct its 
fortifications. Meanwhile other armies were engaged in the 
conquest of the empire of the Hsia in China. This was 
annexed, and only the southern part of the Kin empire re- 
mained unsubdued. In 1227 Jengis Khan died in the midst 
of a career of triumph. His empire reached already from the 
Pacific to the Dnieper. And it was an empire still vigorously 
expanding. 

Like all the empires founded by nomads, it was, to begin with, 
purely a military and administrative empire, a framework 
rather than a rule. It centred on the personality of the mon- 
arch, and its relations with the mass of the populations over 
which it iTiled was simply one of taxation for the maintenance 
of the horde. But Jengis Khan had called to his aid a very 
able and experienced administrator of the Kin empire, who 
was learned in all the traditions and science of the Chinese. 
This statesman, Yeliu Chutsai, was able to carry on the affairs 
of the Mongols long after the death of Jengis Khan, and there 
can be little doubt that he is one of the great political heroes of 
history. He tempered the barbaric ferocity of his masters, 
and saved innumerable cities and works of art from destruction. 
Lie collected archives and inscriptions, and when he was accused 
of corruption, his sole wealth was found to consist of documents 
and a few musical instruments. To him perhaps quite as much 
as to Jengis is the efficiency of the ]\rongol military machine to 
be ascribed. Under Jengis, we may note further, we find the 
completest religious toleration established across the entire 
breadth of Asia. 

At the death of Jengis the capital of the new empire was still 
in the great barbaric town of Karakorum in Mongolia. There 
an assembly of Mongol leaders elected Ogdai Khan, the son of 
Jengis, as his successor. The war against the vestiges of the 
Kin empire was prosecuted until Kin was altogether subdued 
(1234). The Chinese empire to the south under the Sung 
dynasty helped the Mongols in this task, so destroying their 
own bulwark against the universal conquerors. The Mongol 
hosts then swept right across Asia to Russia (1235), an amaz- 
ing march. Kieff was destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 673 

became tributary to tbo Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a 
mixed army of Poles and Germans was annihilated at the battle 
of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick 
II does not seem to have made any great efforts to stay the 
advancing tide. 

"It is only recently," says Bury in his notes to Gibbon's 
Decline and Fall of the Rornan Empire, ''that European history 
has begim to understand that the successes of the Mongol army 
which overran Poland and occupied Hungary in the spring of 
A.D. 1241 were won by consummate strategy and were not due 
to a mere overwhelming superiority of numbers. But this fact 
has not yet become a matter of common knowledge ; the vulgar 
opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild horde carrying 
all before them solely by their multitude, and galloping through 
Eastern Europe without a strategic plan^ rushing at all obstacles 
and overcoming them by mere weight, still prevails. . . . 

"It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrange- 
ments of the commander were carried out in operations extend- 
ing from the Lower Vistula to Transylvania. Such a cam- 
paign was quite beyond the power of any European army of the 
time, and it was beyond the vision of any European commander. 
There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II downward, 
who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should 
also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise 
with full knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and 
the condition of Poland — they had taken care to inform them- 
selves by a well-organized system of spies ; on the other hand, 
the Hungarians and Christian poM^ers, like childish barbarians, 
knew hardly anything about their enemies." 

But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did 
not continue their drive westward. They were getting into 
woodlands and hilly country, which did not suit their tacticsj 
and so they turned southward and prepared to settle in Hun- 
gary, massacring or assimilating the kindred Magyar, even as 
these had previously massacred and assimilated the mixed Scy- 
thians and Avars and Huns before them. From the Hungarian 
plain they would probably have made raids west and south as the 
Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the 
seventh and eighth, and the Huns in the fifth. But in Asia the 
Mongols were fighting a stiff war of conquest against the Sung, 
and they were also raiding Persia and Asia Minor; Ogdai died 



674 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

suddenly, and in 1242 there was trouble about the succession, 
and recalled by this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to 
pour back across Hungary and Kumania towards the east. 

To the great relief of Europe the dynastic troubles at Kara- 
korum lasted for some years, and this vast new empire showed 
sig-ns of splitting up. Mangu Khan became the Great Khan in 
1251, and he nominated his brother Kublai Khan as Governor- 
General of China. Slowly but surely the entire Sung empire 
was subjugated, and as it was subjugated the eastern Mongols 
became more and more Chinese in their culture and methods. 
Tibet was invaded and devastated by Mangu, and Persia and 
Syria invaded in good earnest. Another brother of Mangu, 
Hulagu, was in conmiand of this latter war. He turned his 
arms against the caliphate and captured Bagdad, in which city 
he perpetrated a massacre of the entire population. Bagdad was 
still the religious capital of Islam, and the Mongols had become 
bitterly hostile to the Moslems. This hostility exacerbated the 
natural discord of nomad and townsman. In 1259 Mangu died, 
and in 1260 — for it took the best part of a year for the Mongol 
leaders to gather from the extremities of this vast empire, from 
Hungary and Syria and Scind and China — Kublai was elected 
Great Khan. He was already deeply interested in Chinese af- 
fairs ; he made his capital Pekin instead of Karakorum, and Per- 
sia, Syria, and Asia Minor became virtually independent under 
his brother Hulagu, while the hordes of Mongols in Russia and 
Asia next to Russia, and various smaller Mongol groups in 
Turkestan became also practically separate. Kublai died in 
1294, and with his death even the titular supremacy of the 
Great Khan disappeared. 

At the death of Kublai there was a main Mongol empire, 
with Pekin as its capital, including all China and Mongolia ; 
there was a second great Mongol empire, that of Kipchak in 
Russia ; there was a third in Persia, that founded by Hulagu, 
the Ilkhan empire, to which the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor 
were tributary ; there was a Siberian state between Kipchak and 
Mongolia ; and another separate state ''Great Turkey" in Turk- 
estan. It is particularly remarkable that India beyond the 
Punjab was never invaded by the Mongols during this period, 
and that an army under the Sultan of Egypt completely de- 
feated Ketboga, Hulagu's general, in Palestine (1260), and 
stopped them from entering Africa. By 1260 the impulse of 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 675 

Mongol conquest had already passed its zenith. Thereafter the 
Mongol story is one of division and decay. 

The Mongol dynasty that Kublai Khan had founded in China, 
the Yuan dynasty, lasted from 1280 until 1368. Later on a 
recrudescence of Mongolian energy in Western Asia was des- 
tined to create a still more endiu'ing monarchy in India. 

§ 3 

Now this story of Mongolian conquests is surely the most 
remarkable in all history. The conquests of Alexander the 
Great cannot compare with them in extent. And their effect 
in diffusing and broadening men's ideas, though such things are 
more difficult to estimate, is at least comparable to the spread of 
the Hellenic civilization which is associated with Alexander's 
adventure. For a time all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed 
an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open, and 
representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Kara- 
korum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the 
religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great 
hopes were entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the 
Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion so far had been 
Shamanism, a pi-imitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Bud- 
dhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese 
artificers, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with 
Arab officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathe- 
maticians at the Mongol court. We hear too much in history 
of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not enough 
of their indubitable curiosity and zest for learning. Not per- 
haps as an originative people, but as transmitters of knowledge 
and method their influence upon the world's history has been 
enormous. And everything one can learn of the vague and 
romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the 
impression that these men were built upon a larger scale, and 
were at least as understanding and creative monarchs as either 
that flamboyant but egotistical figure Alexander the Great, or 
that raiser of political ghosts, that energetic but illiterate 
theologian, Charlemagne. 

The missionary enterprises of the papacy in Mongolia ended 
in failure. Christianity was losing its persuasive power. The 
Mongols had no prejudice against Christianity; they evidently 



670 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 677 

preferred it at first to Islam ; but the missions that came to them 
were manifestly using the power in the great teachings of Jesus 
to advance the vast claims of the Pope to world dominion. 
Christianity so vitiated was not good enough for the Mongol 
mind. To make the empire of the Mongols part of the kingdom 
of God might have appealed to them ; but not to make it a fief 
of a group of French and Italian priests, whose claims were 
as gigantic as their powers and outlook were feeble, who were 
now the creatures of the Emperor of Germany, now the nominees 
of the King of France, and now the victims of their own petty 
spites and vanities. In 1269 Kublai Khan sent a mission to the 
Pope with the evident intention of finding some common mode 
of action with Western Christendom. He asked that a hundred 
men of learning and ability should be sent to his court to estab- 
lish an understanding. His mission found the Western world 
popeless, and engaged in one of those disputes about the suc- 
cession that are so frequent in the history of the papacy. For 
two years there was no pope at all. When at last a pope was 
appointed, he dispatched two Dominican friars to convert the 
greatest power in Asia to his rule ! Those worthy men were 
appalled by the length and hardship of the journey before them, 
and found an early excuse for abandoning the expedition. 

But this abortive mission was only one of a number of at- 
tempts to communicate, and always they were feeble and feeble- 
spirited attempts, with nothing of the conquering fire of the 
earlier Christian missions. Innocent IV had already sent some 
Dominicans to Karakorum, and St. Louis of France had also 
dispatched missionaries and relics by way of Persia ; Mangu 
Khan had numerous Nestorian Christians at his court, and sub- 
sequent papal envoys actually reached Pekin. We hear of 
the appointment of various legates and bishops to the East, but 
many of these seem to have lost themselves and perhaps their 
lives before they reached China. There was a papal legate in 
Pekin in 1346, but he seems to have been a mere papal diplo- 
matist. With the downfall of the Mongolian (Yuan) dynasty 
(1368), the dwindling opportunity of the Christian missions 
passed altogether. The house of Yuan was followed by that of 
Ming, a strongly nationalist Chinese dynasty, at first very hos- 
tile to all foreigners. There may have been a massacre of the 
Christian missions. Until the later days of the Mings (1644) 
little more is heard of Christianity, whether Nestorian or Cath- 



678 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

olic, in China. Then a fresh and rather more successful at- 
tempt to propagate Catholic Christianity in China was made 
by the Jesuits, but this second missionary wave reached China 
by the sea. 

In the year 1298 a naval battle occurred between the Genoese 
and the Venetians, in which the latter were defeated. Among 
the 7,000 prisoners taken by the Genoese was a Venetian gentle- 
man named Marco Polo, who had been a great traveller, and 
who was very generally believed by his neighbours to be given 
to exaggeration. He had taken part in that first mission to 
Kublai Khan, and had gone on when the two Dominicans turned 
back. While this Marco Polo was a prisoner in Genoa, he be- 
guiled his tedium by talking of his travels to a certain writer 
named Eusticiano, who wrote them down. We will not enter 
here into the vexed question of the exact authenticity of Eusti- 
ciano's story — we do not certainly know in what language it was 
written — but there can be no doubt of the general truth of this 
remarkable narrative, which became enormously popular in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with all men of active intelli- 
gence. The Travels of Marco Polo is one of the great books of 
history. It opens this world of the thirteenth century, this cen- 
tury which saw the reign of Frederick II and the beginnings of 
the Inquisition, to our imaginations as no mere historian's chron- 
icle can do. It led directly to the discovery of America. 

It begins by telling of the journey of Marco's father, Nicolo 
Polo, and uncle, Maffeo Polo, to China. These two were Vene- 
tian merchants of standing, living in Constantinople, and some- 
when about 1260 they went to the Crimea and thence to Kazan ; 
from that place they journeyed to Bokhara, and at Bokhara 
they fell in with a party of envoys from Kublai Khan in China 
to his brother Hulagu in Persia. These envoys pressed them 
to come on to the Great Khan, who at that time had never seen 
men of the ''Latin" peoples. They went on ; and it is clear they 
made a very favourable impression upon Kublai, and interested 
him greatly in the civilization of Christendom. They were 
made the bearers of that request for a hundred teachers and 
learned men, "intelligent men acquainted with the Seven Arts, 
able to enter into controversy and able clearly to prove to idol- 
aters and other kinds of folk that the Law of Christ was best," 
to which we have just alluded. But when they returned Chris- 
tendom was in a phase of confusion, and it was only after a 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 679 

delay of two years that they got their authorization to start for 
China again in the company of those two faint-hearted Domini- 
cans. They took with them young Marco, and it is due to his 
presence and the boredom of his subsequent captivity at Genoa 
that this most interesting experience has been preserved to us. 
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the 
Crimea, as in the previous expedition. They had with them 
a gold tablet and other indications from the Great Khan that 
must have greatly facilitated their journey. The Great Kahn 
had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns in the Holy 
Sepulchre at Jerusalem ; and so thither they first went, and 
then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far nort,h 
because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Ilkhan domains at 
this time. Thence they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz 
on the Persian Gulf, as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At 
Ormuz they met merchants from India. For some reason they 
did not take ship, but instead turned northward through the 
Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kash- 
gar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob ISTor (so following in the 
footsteps of Yuan Chwang) into the Hwangho valley and on to 
Pekin. Pekin, Polo calls "Cambalue" ; Northern China, 
"Cathay" (= Khitan) ; and Southern China of the former 
Sung dynasty, "Manzi." At Pekin was the Great Khan, and 
they were hospitably entertained. Marco particularly pleased 
Kublai ; he was young and clever, and it is clear he had masterec' 
the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was given an official 
position and sent on several missions, chiefly in South-west 
China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and 
prosperous country, "all the way excellent hostelries for travel- 
lers," and "fine vineyards, fields and gardens," of "many 
abbeys" of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of "cloth of silk 
and gold and many fine taffetas," a "constant succession of 
cities and boroughs," and so on, first roused the incredulity and 
then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, 
and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants, and how 
these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, and also of 
the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan, and grea ily ex- 
aggerated the amount of gold in that country. And, still more 
wonderful, he told of Christians and Christian rulers in China, 
and of a certain "Prester John," John the Priest, who was the 
"king" of a Christian people. Those people he had not seen. Ap- 



680 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

parently they were a tribe of Nestorian Tartars in Mongolia. An 
understandable excitement probably made Rusticiano over-em- 
phasize what must have seemed to him the greatest mai'vel of 
the whole story, and Prester John became one of the most stimu.- 
lating legends of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It 
encouraged European enterprise enormously to think that far 
away in China was a community of their co-religionists, pre- 
sumably ready to welcome and assist them. For three years 
Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he prob- 
ably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being very little more 
of a foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also 
have been sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention 
a certain Polo attached to the imperial council in 1277, a very 
valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story. 

The Polos had taken about three and a half years to get to 
China. They stayed there upwards of sixteen. Then they began 
to feel homesick. They were the proteges of Kublai, and pos- 
sibly they felt that his favours roused a certain envy that might 
have disagreeable results after his death. They sought his per- 
mission to return. For a time he refused it, and then an oppor- 
tunity occurred. Argon, the Ilkhan monarch of Persia, the 
grandson of Hulagii, Kublai's brother, had lost his Mongol wife, 
and on her deathbed had promised not to wed any other woman 
but a Mongol of her own tribe. He sent ambassadors to Pekin, 
and a suitable princess was selected, a girl of seventeen. To 
spare her the fatigaies of the caravan route, it was decided to 
send her by sea with a suitable escort. The ''Barons" in charge 
of her asked for the company of the Polos because these latter 
were experienced travellers and sage men, and the Polos 
snatched at this opportunity of getting homeward. The expedi- 
tion sailed from some port on the east of South China ; they 
stayed long in Sumatra and South India, and they reached Per- 
sia after a voyage of two years. They delivered the young lady 
safely to Argon's successor — for Argon was dead — and she mar- 
ried Argon's son. The Poles then went by Tabriz to Trebizond, 
sailed to Constantinople, and got back to Venice about 1295. It 
is related that the returned travellers, dressed in Tartar garb, 
were refused admission to their own house. It was some time 
before they could establish their identity. Many people ^ho 
admitted that, were still inclined to look askance at them as 
shabby wanderers; and, in order to dispel such doubts, they 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 681 

gave a great feast, and when it was at its height they had their 
old padded suits brought to them, dismissed the servants, and 
then ripped open these gai-ments, whereupon an incredible dis- 
play of "rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, emeralds, and diamonds" 
poured out before the dazzled company. Even after this, 
Marco's accounts of the size and population of China were re- 
ceived with much furtive mockery. The wits nicknamed him 
II Milione, because he was always talking of millions of people 
and millions of ducats. 

Such was the story that raised eyebrows first in Venice and 
then throughout the Western world. The European literature, 
and especially the European romance of the fifteenth century, 
echoes with the names in Marco Polo's story, with Cathay and 
Cambaluc and the like. 



These travels of Marco Polo were only the beginning of a very 
considerable intercourse. That intercourse was to bring many 
revolutionary ideas and many revolutionary things to Europe, 
including a greatly extended use of paper and printing from 
blocks, the almost equally revolutionary use of gunpowder in 
warfare, and the mariner's compass which was to release the 
European shipping from navigation by coasting. The popular 
imagination has always been disposed to ascribe every such 
striking result to Marco Polo. He has become the type and 
symbol for all such interchanges. As a matter of fact, there is 
no evidence that he had any share in these three importations. 
There were many mute Marco Polos who never met their Rusti- 
cianos, and history has not preserved their names. Before we go 
on, however, to describe the great widening of the mental hori- 
zons of Europe that was now beginning, and to which this book 
of travels was to contribute very materially, it will be convenient 
first to note a curious side consequence of the great Mongol con- 
quests, the appearance of the Ottoman Turks upon the Darda- 
nelles, and next to state in general terms the breaking up and 
development of the several parts of the empire of Jengis Khan. 

The Ottoman Turks were a little band of fugitives who fled 
south-westerly before the first invasion of Western Turkestan 
by Jengis. They made their long way from Central Asia, over 
deserts and mountains and through alien populations, seeking 



682 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

some new lands in which they might settle. ''A small band of 
alien herdsmen," says Sir Mark Sykes, 'Svandering unchecked 
through crusades and counter-crusades, principalities, empires, 
and states. Where they camped, how they moved and preserved 
their flocks and herds, where they found pasture, how they made 
their peace with the various chiefs through whose territories 
they passed, are questions which one may well ask in wonder." . 

They found a resting-place at last and kindred and congenial 
neighbours on the table-lands of Asia Minor among the Seljuk 
Turks. Most of this country, the modern Anatolia, was now 
largely Turkish in speech and Moslem in religion, except that 
there was a considerable proportion of Greeks, Jews, and Arme- 
nians in the town populations. No doubt the various strains of 
Hittite, Phrygian, Trojan, Lydian, Ionian Greek^ Cimmerian, 
Galatian, and Italian (from the Pergamus times) still flowed 
in the blood of the people, but they had long since forgotten 
these ancestral elements. They were indeed much the same 
blend of ancient Mediterranean dark whites, Nordic Aryans, 
Semites and Mongolians as were the inhabitants of the Balkan 
peninsula, but they believed themselves to be a pure Turanian 
race, and altogether superior to the Christians on the other side 
of the Bosphorus. 

Gradually the Ottoman Turks became important, and at last 
dominant among the small principalities into which the Seljuk 
empire, the empire of "Roum," had fallen. Their relations with 
the dwindling empire of Constantinople remained for some cen- 
turies tolerantly hostile. They made no attack upon the Bos- 
phorus, but they got a footing in Europe at the Dardanelles, 
and, using this route, the route of Xerxes and not the route 
of Darius, they pushed their way steadily into Macedonia, Epi- 
rus, Illyria, Yugo-Slavia, and Bulgaria. In the Serbs (Yugo- 
slavs) and Bulgarians the Turks found people very like them- 
selves in culture and, though neither side recognized it, prob- 
ably very similar in racial admixture, with a little less of the 
dark Mediterranean and Mongolian strains than the Turks and 
a trifle more of the Nordic element. But these Balkan peoples 
were Christians, and bitterly divided among themselves. The 
Turks on the other hand spoke one language ; they had a greater 
sense of unity, they had the Moslem habits of temperance and 
frugality, and they were on the whole better soldiers. They 
converted what they could of the conquered people to Islam ; the 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 683 

Christians they disarmed, and conferred upon them the monop- 
oly of tax-paying. Gradually the Ottoman princes consolidated 
an empire that reached from the Taurus mountains in the east 
to Hungary and Roumania in the west. Adrianople became 
their chief city. They surrounded the shrunken empire of Con- 
stantinople on every side. 

The Ottomans organized a standing military force, the Janis- 
saries, rather on the lines of the Mamelukes who dominated 
Egypt. "These troops were formed of levies of Christian youths 
to the extent of one thousand per annum, who were affiliated to 
the Bektashi order of dervishes, and though at first not obliged 
to embrace Islam, were one and all strongly imbued with the 
mystic and fraternal ideas of the confraternity to which they 
were attached. Highly paid, well disciplined, a close and jeal- 
ous secret society, the Janissaries provided the newly formed 
Ottoman state with a patriotic force of trained infantry soldiers, 
which, in an age of light cavalry and hired companies of mer- 
cenaries, was an invaluable asset. . . . 

"The relations between the Ottoman Sultans and the Em- 
perors has been singular in the annals of Moslem and Christian 
states. The Turks had been involved in the family and dynastic 
quarrels of the Imperial City, were bound by ties of blood to the 
ruling families, frequently supplied troops for the defence of 
Constantinople, and on occasion hired parts of its garrison to 
assist them in their various campaigns ; the sons of the Emperors 
and Byzantine statesmen even accompanied the Turkish forces 
in the field, yet the Ottomans never ceased to annex Imperial 
territories and cities both in Asia and Thrace. This curious 
intercourse between the House of Osman and the Imperial gov- 
ernment had a profound effect on both institutions ; the Greeks 
grew more and more debased and demoralized by the shifts and 
tricks that their military weakness obliged them to adopt to- 
wards their neighbours, the Turks were corrupted by the alien 
atmosphere of intrigue and treachery which crept into their 
domestic life. Fratricide and parricide, the two crimes which 
most frequently stained the annals of the Imperial Palace, even- 
tually formed a part of the policy of the Ottoman dynasty. One 
of the sons of Murad I embarked on an intrigue with Androni- 
cus, the son of the Greek Emperor, to murder their respective 
fathers. . . . 

"The Byzantine found it more easy to negotiate with the Otto- 



684 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



man Pasha than with the Pope. For years the Turks and By- 
zantines had intermarried, and hunted in couples in strange by- 
paths of diplomacy. The Ottoman had played the Bulgar and 
the Serb of Europe against the Emperor, just as the Emperor 
had played the Asiatic Amir against the Sultan ; the Greek and 
Turkish Royal Princes had mutually agreed to hold each other's 
rivals as prisoners and hostages; in fact, Turk and Byzantine 
policy had so intertwined that it is difficult to say whether the 
Turks regarded the Greeks as their allies, enemies, or subjects, 




or whether the Greeks looked upon the Turks as their tyrants, 
destroyers, or protectors. . . ." ^ 

It was in 1453, under the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad IT, 
that Constantinople at last fell to the Moslems. He attacked 
it from the European side, and with a great power of artillery. 
The Greek Emperor was killed, and there was much looting 
and massacre. The great church of St. Sophia which Justin- 
ian the Great had built (532) was plundered of its treasures 
and turned at once into a mosque. This event sent a wave of 

^Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs' Last Heritage. 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 685 

excitement throughout Europe, and an attempt was made to 
organize a crusade, but the days of the cnisades were past. 

Says Sir Mark Sykes: "To the Turks the capture of Con- 
stantinople was a crowning mercy and yet a fatal blow. Con- 
stantinople had been the tutor and polisher of the Turks. So 
long as the Ottomans could draw science, learning, philosophy, 
art, and tolerance from a living fountain of civilization in the 
heart of their dominions, so long had the Ottomans not only 
brute force, but intellectual power. So long as the Ottoman 
Empire had in Constantinople a free port, a market, a centre of 
world finance, a pool of gold, an exchange, so long did the Otto- 
mans never lack for money and financial support. Muhammad 
was a great statesman, the moment he entered Constantinople he 
endeavoured to stay the damage his ambition had done ; he sup- 
ported the patriarch, he conciliated the Greeks, he did all he 
could to continue Constantinople the city of the Emperors . . . 
but the fatal step had been taken, Constantinople as the city of 
the Sultans was Constantinople no more ; the markets died 
away, the culture and civilization fled, the complex finance 
faded from sight ; and the Turks had lost their governors and 
their support. On the other hand, the corruptions of Byzantium 
remained, the bureaucracy, the eunuchs, the palace guards, the 
spies, the bribers, go-betweens — all these the Ottomans took 
over, and all these survived in luxuriant life. The Turks, in 
taking Stambul, let slip a treasure and gained a pestilence. . . ." 

Muhammad's ambition was not sated by the capture of Con- 
stantinople. He set his eyes also upon Eome. He captured 
and looted the Italian town of Otranto, and it is probable that 
a very vigorous and perhaps successful attempt to conquer Italy 
— for the peninsula was divided against itself — was averted only 
by his death (1481). His sons engaged in fratricidal strife. 
Under Bayezid II (1481-1512), his successor, war was carried 
into Poland, and most of Greece was conquered. Selim (1512- 
1520), the son of Bayezid, extended the Ottoman power over 
Armenia and conquered Egypt. In Egypt, the last Abbasid 
Caliph was living under the protection of the Mameluke Sultan 
— for the Fatimite caliphate was a thing of the past. Selim 
bought the title of Caliph from this last degenerate Abbasid, 
and acquired the sacred banner and other relics of the Prophet. 
So the Ottoman Sultan became also Caliph of all Islam. Selim 
was followed by Suleiman the ]\Iagnificent (1520-15G6), who 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 687 

conquered Bagdad in the east and the greater part of Hungary 
in the west, and very nearly captured Vienna. His fleets also 
took Algiers, and inflicted a number of reverses upon the Vene- 
tians. In most of his warfare with the empire he was in alliance 
with the French. Under him the Ottoman power reached its 
zenith. 



Let us now very briefly run over the subsequent development 
of the main masses of the empire of the Great Khan. In no 
case did Christianity succeed in capturing the imagination of 
these Mongol states. Christianity was in a phase of moral and 
intellectual insolvency, without any collective faith, energy, or 
honour ; we have told of the wretched brace of timid Domini- 
cans which was the Pope's reply to the appeal of Kublai Khan, 
and yvG have noted the general failure of the overland missions 
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That apostolic pas- 
sion that could win whole nations to the Kingdom of Heaven 
was dead in the church. 

In 1305, as we have told^ the Pope became the kept pontiff 
of the French king. All the craft and policy of the Popes 
of the thirteenth century to oust the Emperor from Italy had 
only served to let in the French to replace him. From 1305 
to 1377 the Popes remained at Avignon; and such slight mis- 
sionary effort as they made was merely a part of the strategy 
of Western European politics. In 1377 the Pope Gregory XI 
did indeed re-enter Rome and die there, but the French car- 
dinals split off from the others at the election of his successor, 
and two Popes were elected, one at Avignon and one at Rome. 
This split, the Great Schism, lasted from 1378 to 1418. Each 
Pope cursed the other, and put all his supporters under an inter- 
dict. Such was the state of Christianity, and such were now 
the custodians of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All Asia 
was white unto harvest, but there was no effort to reap it. 

When at last the church was reunited and missionary energy 
returned with the foundation of the order of the Jesuits, the 
days of opportunity were over. The possibility of a world-wide 
moral unification of East and West through Christianity had 
passed away. The Mongols in China and Central Asia turned 
to Buddhism; in South Russia, Western Turkestan, and the 
Ilkhan Empire they embraced Islam. 



688 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

§ 5a 

In China the Mongols were already saturated with Chinese 
civilization by the time of Kublai. After 1280 the Chinese an- 
nals treat Kublai as a Chinese monarch, the founder of the 
Yuan dynasty (1280-1368). This Mongol dynasty was finally 
overthrown by a Chinese nationalist movement which set up 
the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a cultivated and artistic line 
of emperors, ruling until a northern people, the Manchus, who 
were the same as the Kin whom Jengis had overthrown, con- 
quered China and established a dynasty which gave way only 
to a native republican form of government in 1912. 

It was the Manchus who obliged the Chinese to wear pigtails 
as a mark of submission. The pigtailed Chinaman is quite a 
recent figure in history. With the coming of the republic 
the wearing of the' pigtail has ceased to be compulsory,, and 
many Chinamen no longer wear it. 

§ 5b 

In the Pamirs, in much of Eastern and Western Turkestan, 
and to the north, the Mongols dropped back towards the tribal 
conditions from which they had been lifted by Jengis. It is 
possible to trace the dwindling succession of many of the small 
Khans who became independent during this period, almost down 
to the present time. The Kalmuks in the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth centuries founded a considerable empire, but dynastic 
troubles broke it up before it had extended its power beyond 
Central Asia. The Chinese recovered Eastern Turkestan from 
them about 1757. 

Tibet was more and more closely linked with China, and be- 
came the great home of Buddhism and Buddhist monasticism. 

Over most of the area of Western Central Asia and Persia 
and Mesopotamia, the ancient distinction of nomad and settled 
population remains to this day. The townsmen despise and 
cheat the nomads, the nomads ill-treat and despise the townsfolk. 

§ 5c 

The Mongols of the great realm of Kipchak remained no- 
madic, and grazed their stock across the wide plains of South 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 689 

Russia and Western Asia adjacent to Russia. They became 
not very devout Moslems, retaining many traces of their earlier 
barbaric Shamanism. Their chief Khan was the Khan of the 
Golden Horde. To the west, over large tracts of open country, 
and more particularly in what is now known as Ukrainia, the 
old Scythian population, Slavs with a Mongol admixture, re- 
verted to a similar nomadic life. These Christian nomads, the 
Cossacks, formed a sort of frontier screen against the Tartars, 
and their free and adventurous life was so attractive to the peas- 
ants of Poland and Lithuania that severe laws had to be passed 
to prevent a vast migration from the plough-lands to the steppes. 
The serf-owning landlords of Poland regarded the Cossacks with 
considerable hostility on this account, and war was as frequent 
between the Polish chivalry and the Cossacks as it was between 
the latter and the Tartars. 

In the empire of Kijx^hak, as in Turkestan almost up to the 
present time, while the nomads roamed over wide areas, a num- 
ber of towns and cultivated regions sustained a settled popula- 
tion which usually paid tribute to the nomad Khan. In such 
towns as Kieff, Moscow, and the like, the pre-Mongol, Christian 
town life went on under Russian dukes or Tartar governors, who 
collected the tribute for the Khan of the Golden Horde. The 
Grand Duke of Moscow gained the confidence of the Khan, and 
gradually, under his authority, obtained an ascendancy over 
many of his fellow tributaries. In the fifteenth century, under 
its grand duke, Ivan III, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), Mos- 
cow threw off its Mongol allegiance and refused to pay tribute 
any longer (1480). The successors of Constantino no longer 
reigned in Constantinople, and Ivan took possession of the By- 
zantine double-headed eagle for his arms. He claimed to be the 
heir to Byzantium because of his marriage (1472) with Zoe 
Palaeologus of the imperial line. This ambitious grand dukedom 
of Moscow assailed and subjugated the ancient Northman trad- 
ing republic of Novgorod to the north, and so the foundations 
of the modern Russian Empire were laid and a link with the 
mercantile life of the Baltic established. Ivan III did not, how- 
ever, carry his claim to be the heir of the Christian nilers of 
Constantinople to the extent of assuming the imperial title. 
This step was taken by his grandson, Ivan IV (Ivan the Terri- 
ble, because of his insane cruelties; 1533-1584). Although the 
ruler of Moscow thus came to be called Tsar (Cnesar), his tradi- 



690 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tion was in many respects Tartar rather than European ; he was 
autocratic after the unlimited Asiatic pattern, and the form of 
Christianity he affected was the Eastern, court-ruled, ''orthodox" 
form, which had reached Russia long before the Mongol con- 
quest, by means of Bulgarian missionaries from Constantinople. 
To the west of the domains of Kipchak, outside the range 
of Mongol rule, a second centre of Slav consolidation had been 
set up during the tenth and eleventh centuries in Poland. The 
Mongol wave had washed over Poland, but had never subjugated 
it. Poland was not ''orthodox," but Roman Catholic in re- 
ligion ; it used the Latin alphabet instead of the strange Russian 
letters, and its monarch never assumed an absolute independence 
of the Emperor. Poland was in fact in its origins an outlying 
part of Christendom and of the Holy Empire ; Russia never was 
anything of the sort. 



§ 5d 

The nature and development of the empire of the Ilkhans in 
Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria is perhaps the most interesting 
of all the stories of these Mongol powers, because in this region 
nomadism really did attempt, and really did to a very consider- 
able degree succeed in its attempt to stamp a settled civilized 
system out of existence. When Jengis Kahn first invaded 
China, we are told that there was a serious discussion among 
the Mongol chiefs whether all the towns and settled populations 
should not be destroyed. To these simple practitioners of the 
open-air life the settled populations seemed corrupt, crowded, 
vicious, eifeminate, dangerous, and incomprehensible ; a detesta- 
ble human efflorescence upon what would otherwise have been 
good pasture. They had no use whatever for the towns. The 
early Franks and the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of South Britain 
seem to have had much the same feeling towards townsmen. 
But it was only under Hulagii in Mesopotamia that these ideas 
seem to have been embodied in a deliberate policy. The Mon- 
gols here did not only burn and massacre; they destroyed the 
irrigation system that had endured for at least eight thousand 
years, and with that the mother civilization of all the Western 
world came to an end. Since the days of the priest-kings of 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 691 

Siimeria there had been a continuous cultivation in these fertile 
regions, an accumulation of tradition, a great population, a suc- 
cession of busy cities, Eridu, Nippur, Babylon, Nineveh, Ctesi- 
phon, Bagdad. Now the fertility ceased. Mesopotamia became 
a land of ruins and desolation, through which great waters ran 
to waste, or overflowed their banks to make malarious swamps. 
Later on Mosul and Bagdad revived feebly as second-rate 
towns. . . . 

But for the defeat and death of Hulagii's general Kitboga 
in Palestine (1260), the same fate might have overtaken Egypt. 
But Egypt was now a Turkish sultanate ; it was dominated by a 
body of soldiers, the Mamelukes, whose ranks, like those of their 
imitators, the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, were re- 
cruited and kept vigorous by the purchase and training of boy 
slaves. A capable Sultan such men would obey ; a weak or evil 
one they would replace. Under this ascendancy Egypt remained 
an independent power until 1517, when it fell to the Ottoman 
Turks. 

The first destructive vigor of HulagTi's Mongols soon subsided, 
but in the fifteenth century a last tornado of nomadism arose 
in Western Turkestan under the leadership of a certain Timur 
the Lame, or Timurlane. He was descended in the female line 
from Jengis Khan. He established himself in Samarkand, and 
spread his authority over Kipchak (Turkestan to South Rus- 
sia), Siberia, and southward as far as the Indus. He assumed 
the title of Great Khan in 1369. He was a nomad of the savage 
school, and he created an empire of desolation from North India 
to Syria. Pyramids of skulls were his particular architectural 
fancy; after the storming of Ispahan he made one of 70,000. 
His ambition was to restore the empire of Jengis Kahn as he 
conceived it, a project in which he completely failed. He spread 
destruction far and wide; the Ottoman Turks — it was before 
the taking of Constantinople and their days of greatness — and 
Egypt paid him tribute; the Punjab he devastated; and Delhi 
surrendered to him. After Delhi had surrendered, however, he 
made a frightful massacre of its inhabitants. At the time of 
his death (1405) very little remained to witness to his power 
but a name of horror, ruins and desolated countries, and a 
shrunken and impoverished domain in Persia, 

The dynasty founded by Timur in Persia was extinguished 
by another Turkoman horde fifty years later. 



692 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 693 

§ 5e 

In 1505 a small Turkoman chieftain, Baber, a descendant of 
Timnr and therefore of Jengis, was forced after some years of 
warfare and some temjwrary successes — for a time he held Sam- 
arkand — to fly with a few followers over the Hindu Kush to 
Afghanistan. There his band increased, and he made himself 
master of Cabul. He assembled an army, accumulated gims, 
and then laid claim to the Punjab, because Timur had conquered 
it a hundred and seven years before. He pushed his successes 
beyond the Punjab. India was in a state of division, and quite 
ready to welcome any capable invader who promised peace and 
order. After various fluctuations of fortune Baber met the 
Sultan of Delhi at Panipat (1525), ten miles north of that 
town, and though he had but 25,000 men, provided, however, 
with guns, against a thousand elephants and four times as many 
men — the numbers, by the by, are his own estimate — he gained 
a complete victory. He ceased to call himself King of Cabul, 
and assumed the title of Emperor of Hindustan. "This," he 
wrote, "is quite a dift'erent world from our countries." It was 
finer, more fertile, altogether richer. He conquered as far as 
Bengal, but his untimely death in 1530 checked the tide of 
Mongol conquest for a quarter of a century, and it was only 
after the accession of his grandson Akbar that it flowed again. 
Akbar subjugated all India as far as Berar, and his great-grand- 
son Aurungzeb (1658-1707) was practically master of the entire 
peninsula. This great dynastv of Baber (1520-1530), Huma- 
yun (1530-1556),^ Akbar (1556-1605), Jehangir (1605-1628), 
Shah Jehan (1628-1658), and Aurungzeb (1658-1707), in 
which son succeeded father for six generations, this "Mogul 
(^ Mongol) dynasty," ^ marks the most splendid age that had 
hitherto dawned upon India. Akbar, next perhaps to Asoka, 
was one of the greatest of Indian monarchs, and one of the few 
royal figures that approach the stature of great men. 

To Akbar it is necessary to give the same distinctive atten- 
tion that we have shown to Charlemagiie or Constantino the 
Great. He is one of the hinges of history. Much of his work 
of consolidation and organization in India survives to this day. 

* "Mogul" is our rendering of the Arabic spelling Mughal, which itself 
was a corruption of Mongol, the Arabic alphabet having no symbol for 
nc— F- H. J. 



694 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

It was taken over and continued by the British when they be- 
came the successors of the Mogul emperors. The British mon- 
arch, indeed, now uses as his Indian title the title of the Mogiil 
emperors, Kaisar-i-Hind. All the other great administrations 
of the descendants of Jengis Khan, in Eussia, throughout West- 
ern and Central Asia and in China, have long since dissolved 
away and given place to other forms of government. Their 
governments were indeed little more than taxing governments ; 
a system of revenue-collecting to feed the central establishment 
of the ruler, like the Golden Horde in South Russia or the 
imperial city at Karakorum or Pekin. • The life and ideas of 
the people they left alone, careless how they lived — so long* as 
they paid. So it was that after centuries of subjugation, a 
Christian Moscow and Kieff, a Shiite Persia, and a thoroughly 
Chinese China rose again from their Mongol submergence. But 
Akbar made a new India. He gave the princes and ruling 
classes of India some inklings at least of a common interest. If 
India is now anything more than a sort of rag-bag of inco- 
herent states and races, a prey to every casual raider from the 
north, it is very largely due to him. 

His distinctive quality was his openness of mind. He set 
himself to make every sort of able man in India, whatever his 
race or religion, available for the public work of Indian life. 
His instinct was the true statesman's instinct for synthesis. 
His empire was to be neither a Moslem nor a Mongol one, nor 
was it to be Rajput or Aryan, or Dravidian, or Hindu, or 
high or low caste ; it was to be Indian. "During the years of 
his training he enjoyed many opportunities of noting the good 
qualities, the fidelity, the devotion, often the nobility of soul, 
of those Hindu princes, whom, because they were followers of 
Brahma, his Moslem courtiers devoted mentally to eternal tor- 
ments. He noted that these men^ and men who thought like 
them, constituted the vast majority of his subjects. He noted, 
further, of many of them, and those the most trustworthy, that 
though they had apparently much to gain from a worldly point 
of view by embracing the religion of the court, they held fast to 
their own. His reflective mind, therefore, was unwilling from 
the outset to accept the theory that because he, the conqueror, 
the ruler, happened to be born a Muhammadan, therefore Mu- 
hammadanism was true for all mankind. Gradually his 
thoughts found words in the utterance : 'Why should I claim to 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 695 

guide men before I myself am gTiided V and, as he listened to 
other doctrines and other creeds, his honest doubts became con- 
firmed, and, noting daily the bitter narrowness of sectarianism, 
no matter of what form of religion, he became more and more 
wedded to the principle of toleration for all." 

"The son of a fugitive emperor/' says Dr. Emil Schmit, ''born 
in the desert, brought up in nominal confinement, he had known 
the bitter side of life from his youth up. Fortune had given 
him a powerful frame, which he trained to support the ex- 
tremities of exertion. Physical exercise was with him a pas- 
sion; he was devoted to the chase and especially to the fierce 
excitement of catching the wild horse or elephant or slaying the 
dangerous tiger. On one occasion, when it w^as necessary to 
dissuade the Eaja of Jodhpore to abandon his intention of forc- 
ing the widow of his deceased son to mount the funeral pyre, 
Akbar rode two hundred and twenty miles in two days. In bat- 
tle he displayed the utmost bravery. He led his troops in person 
during the dangerous part of a campaign, leaving to his gen- 
erals the lighter task of finishing the war. In every victory he 
displayed humanity to the conquered, and decisively opposed 
any exhibition of cruelty. Free from all those prejudices 
which separate society and create dissension, tolerant to men of 
other beliefs, impartial to men of other races, whether Hindu 
or Dravidian, he was a man obviously marked out to weld the 
conflicting elements of his kingdom into a strong and prosperous 
whole. 

"In all seriousness he devoted himself to the work of peace. 
Moderate in all pleasures, needing but little sleep and accus- 
tomed to divide his time with the utmost accuracy, he found 
leisure to devote himself to science and art after the completion 
of his State duties. The famous personages and scholars who 
adorned the capital he had built for himself at Fatepur-Sikri 
were at the same time his friends ; every Thursday evening a 
circle of these was collected for intellectual conversation and 
philosophical discussion. His closest friends were two highly 
talented brothers, Faizi and Abul Fazl, the sons of a learned 
free-thinker. The elder of these was a famous scholar in Hindu 
literature; with his help, and under his direction, Akbar had 
the most important of the Sanskrit works translated into Per- 
sian. Fazl, on the other hand, who was an especially close 
friend of Akbar, was a general, a statesman, and an organizer, 



696 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and to his activity Akbar's kingdom cliiefly owed the solidarity 
of its internal organization." ^ 

(Such was the quality of the circle that used to meet in the 
palaces of Fatehpur-Sikri, buildings which still stand in the 
Indian sunlight — but empty now and desolate. Fatehpur- 
Sikri, like the city of Ambar, is now a dead city. A few years 
ago the child of a British official was killed by a panther in 
one of its silent streets.) 

All this that we have quoted reveals a pre-eminent monarch. 
But Akbar, like all men, great or petty, lived within the limita- 
tions of his period and its circle of ideas. And a Turkoman, 
ruling in India, was necessarily ignorant of much that Europe 
had been painfully learning for a thousand years. He knew 
nothing of the growth of a popular consciousness in Europe, 
and little or nothing of the wide educational possibilities that 
the church had been working out in the West. His upbringing 
in Islam and his native genius made it plain to him that a 
great nation in India could only be cemented by common ideas 
upon a religious basis, but the knowledge of how such a soli- 
darity could be created and sustained by universal schools, 
cheap books, and a university system at once organized and 
free to think, to which the modern state is still feeling its way, 
was as impossible to him as a knowledge of steamboats or aero- 
planes. The form of Islam he knew best was the narrow and 
fiercely intolerant form of the Turkish Sunnites. The Mos- 
lems were only a minority of the population. The problem he 
faced was indeed very parallel to the problem of Constantine 
the Great. But it had peculiar difficulties of its own. He 
never got beyond an attempt to adapt Islam to a wider appeal 
by substituting for "There is one God, and Muhammad is his 
prophet," the decla-ration, ''There is one God, and the Emperor 
is his vice-regent." This he thought might form a common 
platform for every variety of faith in India, that kaleidoscope 
of religions. With this faith he associated a simple ritual bor- 
rowed from the Persian Zorastrians (the Parsees) who still 
survived, and survive to-day, in India. This new state re- 
ligion, however, died with him, because it had no roots in the 
minds of the people about him. 

The essential factor in the organization of a living state, 
the world is coming to realize, is the organization of an educa- 
* Dr. Schmit in Helmolt's History of the World. 



JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS 697 

tion. This Akbar never understood. And he had no class of 
men available who would suggest such an idea to him or help 
him to carry it out. The Moslem teachers in India were not 
so much teachers as conservators of an intense bigotry; they 
did not want a common mind in India, but only a common in- 
tolerance in Islam. The Brahmins, who had the monopoly of 
teaching among the Hindus, had all the conceit and slackness 
of hereditary privilege. Yet though Akbar made no general 
educational scheme for India, he set up a number of Moslem 
and Hindu schools. He knew less and he did more for India 
in these matters than the British who succeeded him. Some 
of the British viceroys have aped his magnificence, his costly 
tents and awnings, his palatial buildings and his elephants of 
state, but none have gone far enough beyond the political out- 
look of this meJitTsval Turkoman to attempt that popular edu- 
cation which is an absolute necessity to India before she can 
play her fitting part in the commonweal of mankind. 

§ 5f 

A curious side result of these later Mongol perturbations, 
those of the fourteenth century of which Timurlane was the 
head and centre, was the appearance of drifting batches of a 
strange refugee Eastern people in Europe, the Gipsies. They 
appeared somewhen about the end of the fourteenth and early 
fifteenth centuries in Greece, where they were believed to be 
Egyptians (hence Gipsy), a very general persuasion which 
they themselves accepted and disseminated. Their leaders, 
however, styled themselves "Counts of Asia Minor." They 
had probably been drifting about Western Asia for some cen- 
turies before the massacres of Timurlane drove them over the 
Hellespont. They may have been dislodged from their original 
homeland — as the Ottoman Turks were — by the great cataclysm 
of Jengis or even earlier. They had drifted about as the Otto- 
man Turks had drifted about, but with less good fortune. They 
spread slowly westward across Europe, strange fragments of 
nomadism in a world of plough and city, driven off their an- 
cient habitat of the Bactrian steppes to harbour upon European 
commons and by hedgerows and in wild woodlands and 
neglected patches. The Germans called them "Hungarians" 
and ''Tartars," the French, "Bohemians." They do not seem 



698 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to have kept the true tradition of their origin, but they have 
a distinctive language which indicates their lost history; it 
contains many North Indian words, and is probably in its 
origin North Indian. There are also considerable Armenian 
and Persian elements in their speech. They are found in all 
European countries to-day; they are tinkers, pedlars, horse- 
dealers, showmen, fortune-tellers, and beggars. To many 
imaginative minds their wayside encampments, with their 
smoking tires, their rounded tents, their hobbled horses, and 
their brawl of sunburnt children, have a very strong appeal. 
Civilization is so new a thing in histors^, and has been for most 
of the time so very local a thing, that it has still to conquer and 
assimilate most of our instincts to its needs. In most of us, 
irked by its conventions and complexities, there stirs the nomad 
strain. We are but half-hearted home-keepers. The blood in 
our veins was brewed on the steppes as well as on the plough- 
lands. 



XXXIV 

THE KENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ' 
(Land Ways Give Place to Sea Ways) 

§ 1. Christianity and Popular Education. § 2. Europe Be- 
gins to Think for Itself. § 3. The Great Plague and the 
Dawn of C omonunism. § 4. How Paper Liberated the 
Human Mind. § 5. Protestantism of the Princes and 
Protestantism of the Peoples. § 6. The Reawakening of 
Science. § 7. The New Growth of European Towns. § 8. 
America Comes into History. § 9. What MachiavelU 
Thought of the World. §10. The Republic of Switzerland. 
§ 11a. The Life of the Emperor Charles V. § 11b. Prot- 
estants if the Prince Wills It. § lie. The Intellectual 
Undertow. 

§ 1 

JUDGED by the map, the three centuries from the begin- 
ning of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century 
were an age of recession for Christendom, These cen- 
turies were the Age of the Mongolian peoples. Nomadism from 
Central Asia dominated the known world. At the crest of this 
period there were rulers of Mongol or the kindred Turkish race 
and nomadic tradition in China, India, Persia, Egypt, North 
Africa, the Balkan peninsula, Hungary, and Russia. The Otto- 
man Turk had even taken to the sea, and fought the Venetian 
upon his own Mediterranean waters. In 1529 the Turks 

* Renascence here means rebirth, and it is applied to the recovery of 
the entire Western world. It is not to be confused with the "Renaissance," 
an educational, literary, and artistic revival that went on in Italy and the 
Western world affected by Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies. The Renaissance was only a part of the Renascence of Europe. 
The Renaissance was a revival due to the exhumation of classical art 
and learning; it was but cme factor in the very much larger and more 
complicated resurrection of European capacity and vigour, with which we 
are dealing in this chapter. 

699 



700 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

besieged Vienna, and were defeated rather by the weather than 
by the defenders. The Habsburg empire of Charles V paid 
the "Sultan tribute. It was not until the battle of Lepanto in 
1571, the battle in which Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, 
lost his left arm, that Christendom, to use his words, '^'broke 
the pride of the Osmans and undeceived the world which had 
regarded the Turkish fleet as invincible." The sole region of 
Christian advance was Spain. A man of foresight surveying 
the world in the early sixteenth century might well have con- 
cluded that it was only a matter of a few generations before 
the whole world became Mongolian — and probably Moslem. 
Just as to-day most people seem to take it for granted that 
European ryle and a sort of liberal Christianity are destined 
to spread over the whole world. Few people seem to realize 
how recent a thing is this European ascendancy. It was only 
as the fifteenth century drew to its close that any indications 
of the real vitality of Western Europe became clearly apparent. 

Our history is now approaching our own times, and our study 
becomes more and more a study of the existing state of affairs. 
The European or Europeanized system in which the reader is 
living, is the same system that we see developing in the 
crumpled-up, Mongol-threatened Europe of the early fifteenth 
century. Its problems then were the embryonic form of the 
problems of to-day. It is impossible to discuss that time with- 
out discussing our own time. We become political in spite of 
ourselves. "Politics without history has no root," said Sir 
J. R. Seeley; ''history without politics has no fruit." 

Let us try, with as much detachment as we can achieve, to 
discover what the forces were that were dividing and holding 
back the energies of Europe during this tremendous outbreak 
of the Mongol peoples, and how we are to explain the accumu- 
lation of mental and physical energy that undoubtedly went 
on during this phase of apparent retrocession, and which broke 
out so impressively at its close.- 

Now, just as in the Mesozoic Age, while the gTcat reptiles 
lorded it over the earth, there were developing in odd out-of- 
the-way corners those hairy mammals and feathered birds who 
were finally to supersede that tremendous fauna altog:ether by 
another far more versatile and capable, so in the limited terri- 
tories of Western Europe of the Middle Ages, while the Mon- 
golian monarchies dominated the world from the Danube to 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 701 




702 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the Pacific and from the Arctic seas to Madras and Morocco 
and the Nile, the fundamental lines of a new and harder and 
more efficient type of human community were hein^ laid down. 
This type of community, which is still only in the phase of 
formation, which is still growing and experimental, we may 
perhaps speak of as the "modem state." This is, we must 
recognize, a vague expression, but we shall endeavour to get 
meaning into it as we proceed. We have noted the appearance 
of its main root ideas in the Greek republics and especially in 
Athens, in the great Roman republic, in Judaism, in Islam, and 
in the story of Western Catholicism. Essentially this modem 
state, as we see it growing under our eyes to-day, is a tentative 
combination of two apparently contradictory ideas, the idea of 
a community of faith and obedience, such as the earliest civili- 
zations undoubtedly were, and the idea of a community of will, 
such as were the primitive political gi'oupings of the Nordic 
and Hunnish peoples. For thousands of years the settled 
civilized peoples, who were originally in most cases dark-white 
Caucasians, or Dravidian or Southern Mongolian peoples, seem 
to have developed their ideas and habits along the line of wor- 
ship and personal subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs 
along the line of personal self-reliance and self-assertion. 
Naturally enough under the circumstances the nomadic peoples 
were always supplying the civilizations with fresh rulers and 
new aristocracies. That is the rhythm of all early history. It 
was only after thousands of years of cyclic changes between 
refreshment by nomadic conquest, civilization, decadence, and 
fresh conquest that the present process of a mutual blending of 
"civilized" and "free" tendencies into a new type of commu- 
nity, that now demands our attention and which is the substance 
of contemporary history, began. 

We have traced in this history the slow development of larger 
and larger "civilized" human communities from the days of 
the primitive Palaeolithic family tribe. We have seen how the 
advantages and necessities of cultivation, the fear of tribal 
gods, the ideas of the priest-king and the god-king, played their 
part in consolidating continually larger and more powerful 
societies in regions of maximum fertility. We have watched 
the interplay of priest, who was usually native, and monarch, 
who was usually a conqueror, in these early civilizations, the 
development of a written tradition and its escape from priestly 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 703 

control, and the appearance of novel forces, at first appf^,rently 
incidental and secondary, which we have called the free intelli- 
gence and the free conscience of mankind. We have seen the 
rulers of the primitive civilizations of the river valleys widen- 
ing their area and extending their sway, and simultaneously 
over the less fertile areas of the earth we have seen mere tribal 
savagery develop into a more and more united and politically 
competent nomadism. Steadily and divergently mankind pur- 
sued one or other of these two lines. For long ages all the 
civilizations grew and developed along monarchist lines, upon 
lines of absolute monarchy, and in every monarchy and dynasty 
we have watched, as if it were a necessary process, efficiency 
and energy give way to pomp, indolence, and decay, and finally 
succumb to some fresher lineage from the desert or the steppe. 
The story of the early cultivating civilizations and their temples 
and courts and cities bulks large in human history, but it is 
well to remember that the scene of that story was never more 
than a very small part of the land surface of the globe. Over 
the greater part of the earth until quite recently, until the last 
two thousand years, the hardier, less numerous tribal peoples 
of forest and parkland and the nomadic peoples of the seasonal 
grasslands maintained and developed their own ways of life. 

The primitive civilizations were, we may say, ''communities 
of obedience" ; obedience to god-kings or kings under gods was 
their cement; the nomadic tendency on the other hand has 
always been towards a different type of association which we 
shall here call a "community of will." In a wandering, fight- 
ing community the individual must be at once self-reliant and 
disciplined. The chiefs of such communities must be chiefs 
who are followed, not masters who compel. This community 
of will is traceable throughout the entire history of mankind; 
everywhere we find the original disposition of all the nomads 
alike, Nordic, Semitic, or Mongolian, was individually more 
willing and more erect than that of the settled folk. The 
Nordic peoples came into Italy and Greece imder leader kings ; 
they did not bring any systematic temple cults with them, they 
found such things in the conquered lands and adapted as they 
adopted them. The Greeks and Latins lapsed very easily again 
into republics, and so did the Aryans in India. There was a 
tradition of election also in the early Frankish and German 
kingdoms, though the decision was usually taken between one 



704 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

or other members of a royal caste or family. The early Caliphs 
were elected, the Judges of Israel and the ''kings" of Carthage 
and Tyre were elected, and so was the Great Khan of the 
Mongols until Kublai became a Chinese monarch. . . . 
Equally constant in the settled lands do we find the opposite 
idea, the idea of a non-elective divinity in kings and of their 
natural and inherent right to rule. ... As our history has 
developed we have noted the appearance of new and complicat- 
ing elements in the story of human societies; we have seen that 
nomad turned go-between, the trader, appear, and we have 
noted the growing importance of shipping in the world. It 
seems as inevitable that voyaging should make men free in 
their minds as that settlement within a narrow horizon should 
make men timid and servile. . . . But in spite of all such 
complications, the broad antagonism between the method of 
cbedience and the method of will runs through history down 
into our own times. To this day their reconciliation is 
incomplete. 

Civilization even in its most servile forms has always offered 
much that is enormously attractive, convenient, and congenial 
to mankind ; but something restless and untamed in our race 
has striven continually to convert civilization from its original 
reliance upon unparticipating obedience into a community of 
participating wills. And to the lurking nomadism in our blood, 
and particularly in the blood of monarchs and aristocracies, we 
must ascribe also that incessant urgency towards a wider range 
that forces every state to extend its boundaries if it can, and 
to spread its interests to the ends of the earth. The power 
of nomadic restlessness that tends to bring all the earth under 
one rule, seems to be identical with the spirit that makes most 
of us chafe under direction and restraint, and seek to partici- 
pate in whatever government we tolerate. And this natural, 
this temperamental struggle of mankind to reconcile civilization 
with freedom has been kept alive age after age by the military 
and political impotence of every "community of obedience" 
that has ever existed. Obedience, once men are broken to it, 
can be easily captured and transferred ; witness the passive role 
of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, the original and typical 
lands of submission, the "cradles of civilization," as they have 
passed from one lordship to another. A servile civilization is a 
standing invitation to predatory free men. But on the other 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 705 

hand a "community of will" necessitates a fusion of intractable 
materials; it is a far harder community to bring about, and still 
more difficult to maintain. The story of Alexander the Great 
displays the community of will of the Macedonian captains 
gradually dissolving before his demand that they shoulcl wor- 
ship him. The incident of the murder of Clitus is quite typical 
of the struggle between the free and the servile tradition that 
went on whenever a new conqueror from the open lands and 
the open air found himself installed in the palace of an ancient 
monarchy. 

In the case of the Roman Republic, history tells of the first 
big community of will in the world's history, the first free com- 
munity much larger than a city, and how it weakened with 
growth and spent itself upon success until at last it gave way 
to a monarchy of the ancient type, and decayed swiftly into 
one of the feeblest communities of servitude that ever collapsed 
before a handful of invaders. We have given some attention 
in this book to the factors in that decay, because they are of 
primary importance in human history. One of the most evi- 
dent was the want of any wide organization of education to 
base the ordinary citizens' minds upon the idea of service and 
obligation to the republic, to keep them willing, that is; an- 
other was the absence of any medium of general information 
to keep their activities in harmony, to enable them to will as 
one body. The community of will is limited in size by the 
limitations set upon the possibilities of a community of knowl- 
edge. The concentration of property in a few hands and the 
replacement of free workers by slaves were rendered possible 
by the decay of public spirit and the confusion of the public 
intelligence that resulted from these limitations. There was, 
moreover, no efficient religious idea behind the Roman state; 
the dark Etruscan liver-peering cult of Rome was as little 
adapted to the political needs of a great community as the very 
similar Shamanism of the Mongols. It is in the fact that both 
Christianity and Islam, in their distinctive ways, did at least 
promise to supply, for the first time in human experience, this 
patent gap in the Roman republican system as well as in the 
nomadic system, to give a common moral education for a mass 
of people, and to supply them with a common history of the 
past and a common idea of a human purpose and destiny, that 
their enormous historical importance lies. Aristotle, as we have 



706 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

noted, had set a limit to the ideal community of a few thousand 
citizens, because he could not conceive how a larger multitude 
could be held together by a common idea. He had had no 
experience of any sort of education beyond the tutorial methods 
of his time. Greek education was almost purely viva-voce edu- 
cation ; it could reach therefore only to a limited aristocracy. 
Both the Christian church and Islam demonstrated the un- 
soundness of Aristotle's limitation. We may think they did 
their task of education in their vast fields of opportunity 
crudely or badly, but the point of interest to us is that they 
did it at all. Both sustained almost world-wide propagandas 
of idea and inspiration. Both relied successfully upon the 
power of the written word to link great multitudes of diverse 
men together in common enterprises. By the eleventh century, 
as we have seen, the idea of Christendom had been imposed upon 
all the vast warring miscellany of the smashed and pulverized 
Western empire, and upon Europe far beyond its limits, as a 
uniting and inspiring idea. It had made a shallow but effective 
community of will over an unprecedented area and out of an 
unprecedented multitude of human beings. Only one other 
thing at all like this had ever happened to any great section of 
mankind before, and that was the idea of a community of good 
behaviour that the literati had spread throughout China. ^ 

The Catholic Church provided what the Roman Republic 
had lacked, a system of popular teaching, a number of uni- 
versities and methods of intellectual inter-communication. By 
this achievement it opened the way to the new possibilities of 
human government that now become apparent in this Outline, 
possibilities that are still being apprehended and worked out 
in the world in which we are living. Hitherto the government 
of states had been either authoritative, under some uncriticized 
and unchallenged combination of priest and monarch, or it 
had been a democracy, uneducated and uninformed, degenerat- 
ing with any considerable increase of size, as Rome and Athens 
did, into a mere rule by mob and politician. But by the thir- 
teenth century the first intimations had already dawned of an 
ideal of government which is still making its way to realiza- 
tion, the modern ideal, the ideal of a world-wide educational 
government, in which the ordinary man is neither the slave 

*But the Jews were already holding their community together by sys- 
tematic education at least as early as the beginning of the Christian era. 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 707 

of an absolute monarch nor of a demagogue-ruled state, but an 
informed, inspired, and consulted part of his community. It is 
upon the word educational that stress must be laid, and upon 
the idea that information must precede consultation. It is in 
the practical realization of this idea that education is a collec- 
tive function and not a private affair that one essential distinc- 
tion of the "modern state" from any of its precursors lies. The 
modern citizen, men are coming to realize, must be informed 
first and then consulted. Before he can vote he must hear the 
evidence; before he can decide he must know. It is not by 
setting up polling booths, but by setting up schools and making 
literature and knowledge and news universally accessible that 
the way is opened from servitude and confusion to that will- 
ingly co-operative state which is the modern ideal. Votes in 
themselves are worthless things. Men had votes in Italy in 
the time of the Gracchi. Their votes did not help them. Until 
a man has education, a vote is a useless and dangerous thing 
for him to possess. The ideal community towards which we 
move is not a community of will simply ; it is a cojnmunity of 
knowledge and will, replacing a community of faith and obedi- 
ence. Education is the adapter which will make the nomadic 
spirit of freedom and self-reliance coriipatible with the co-opera- 
tions and wealth and security of civilization. 



But though it is certain that the Catholic Church, through 
its propagandas, its popular appeals, its schools and universities, 
opened up the prospect of the modern educational state in 
Europe, it is equally certain that the Catholic Church never 
intended to do anything of the sort. It did not send out knowl- 
edge with its blessing ; it let it loose inadvertently. It was not 
the Roman Republic whose heir the Church esteemed itself, but 
the Roman Emperor. Its conception of education was not re- 
lease, not an invitation to participate, but the subjugation of 
minds. Two of the greatest educators of the Middle Ages 
were indeed not churchmen at all, but monarchs and statesmen, 
Charlemagne and Alfred the Great of England, who made use 
of the church organization. But it was the church that had 
provided the organization. Church and monarchs in their 
mutual grapple for power were both calling to their aid the 



708 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

thoughts of the common man. In response to these conflicting 
appeals appeared the common man^ the unofficial outside inde- 
pendent man, thinking for himself. 

Already in the thirteenth century we have seen Pope Gregory 
IX and the Emperor Frederick II engaging in a violent public 
controversy. Already then there was a sense that a new arbi- 
trator greater than ix)pe or monarchy had come into the world, 
that there were readers and a public opinion. The exodus of 
the popes to Avignon, and the divisions and disorders of the 
Papacy during the fourteenth century, stimulated this free 
judgment upon authority throughout Europe enormously. 

At first the current criticism upon the church concerned only 
moral and material things. The wealth and luxury of the higher 
clergy and the heavy papal taxation were the chief grounds of 
complaint. And the earlier attempts to restore Christian sim- 
plicity, the foundation of the Franciscans, for example, were 
not movements of separation, but movements of revival. Only 
later did a deeper and more distinctive criticism develop which 
attacked the central fact of the church's teaching and the justifi- 
cation of pi'iestly importance ; namely, the sacrifice of the mass. 

We have sketched in broad outlines the early beginnings of 
Christianity, and we have shown how rapidly that difficult and 
austere conception of the Kingdom of God, which was the cen- 
tral idea of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, was overlaid 
by a revival of the ancient sacrificial idea, a doctrine more diffi- 
cult indeed to grasp, but easier to reconcile with the habits and 
dispositions and acquiescences of everyday life in the Near East. 
We have noted how a sort of theocrasia went on between Chris- 
tianity and Judaism and the cult of the Serapeum and Mithra- 
ism and other competing cults^ by which the Mithraist Sunday, 
the Jewish idea of blood as a religious essential, the Alexan- 
drian importance of the Mother of God, the shaven and 
fasting priest, self-tormenting asceticism, and many other mat- 
ters of belief and ritual and practice, became grafted upon the 
developing religion. These adaptations, no doubt, made the 
new teaching much more understandable and acceptable in 
Egypt and Syria and the like. They were things in the way 
of thought of the dark-white Mediterranean race; they were 
congenial to that type. But as we have shown in our story of 
Muhammad, these acquisitions did not make Christianity more 
acceptable to the Arab nomads ; to them these features made it 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 709 

disgusting. And so, too, the robed and shaven monlc and nun 
and priest seem to have roused something like an instinctive 
hostility in the ISTordic barbarians of the North and West. We 
have noted the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and 
Northmen against the monks and nuns. They seem to have 
felt that the lives and habits of these devotees were queer and 
unnatural. 

The clash between what we may call the "dark-white" factors 
and the newer elements in Christianity was no doubt intensi- 
fied by Pope Gregory Vll's imposition of celibacy upon the 
Catholic priests in the eleventh century. The East had known 
religious celibates for thousands of years ; in the West they were 
regarded with scepticism and suspicion. 

And now in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the 
lay mind of the Nordic peoples began to acquire learning, to 
read and write and express itself, and as it came into touch 
with the stimulating activities of the x\rab mind, we find a 
much more formidable criticism of Catholicism beginning, an 
intellectual attack upon the priest as priest, and upon the cere- 
mony of the mass as the central fact of the religious life, 
coupled with a demand for a return to the personal teachings 
of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. 

We have already mentioned the career of the Englishman 
Wycliffe {c. 1320-1384), and how he translated the Bible into 
English in order to set up a counter authority to that of the 
Pope. He denounced the doctrines of the church about the 
mass as disastrous error, and particularly the teaching that the 
consecrated bread eaten in that ceremony becomes in some 
magical way the actual body of Christ. We will not pursue 
the question of transubstantiation, as this process of the mystical 
change of the elements in the sacrament is called, into its 
intricacies. These are matters for the theological specialist. 
But it will be obvious that any doctrine, such as the Catholic 
doctrine, which makes the consecration of the elements in the 
sacrament a miraculous process performed by the priest, and 
only to be performed by the priest, and which makes the sacra- 
ment the central necessity of the religious system, enhances the 
importance of the priestly order enormously. On the other 
hand, the view, which was the typical "Protestant" view, that 
this sacrament is a mere eating of bread and drinking of wine 
as a personal remembrance of Jesus of Nazareth, does away 



710 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

at last with any particular need for a consecrated priest at all. 
Wycliffe himself did not go to this extremity ; he was a priest, 
and he remained a priest to the end of his life, he held that 
God was spiritually if not substantially present in the conse- 
crated bread, but his doctrine raised a question that carried 
men far beyond his positions. From the point of view of the 
historian, the struggle against Rome that Wycliffe opened be- 
came very speedily a struggle of what one may call rational or 
layman's religion making its appeal to the free intelligence and 
the free conscience in mankind, against authoritative, tradi- 
tional, ceremonial, and priestly religion. The ultimate tendency 
of this complicated struggle was to strip Christianity as bare 
as Islam of every vestige of ancient priestcraft, to revert to 
the Bible documents as authority, and to recover, if possible, 
the primordial teachings of Jesus. Most of its issues are still 
undecided among Christians to this day. 

Wycliffe's writings had nowhere more influence than in Bo- 
hemia. About 1396 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a 
series of lectures in the university of Prague based upon the 
doctrines of the great Oxford teacher. Huss became rector of 
the university, and his teachings roused the church to excom- 
municate him (1412). This was at the time of the Great 
Schism, just before the Council of Constance (1414-1418) 
gathered to discuss the scandalous disorder of the church. We 
have already told how the schism was ended by the election of 
Martin V. The council aspired to reunite Christendom com- 
pletely. But the methods by which it sought this reunion jar 
with our modern consciences. Wycliffe's bones were condemned 
to be burnt. Huss was decoyed to Constance under promise of 
a safe conduct, and he was then put upon his trial for heresy. 
He was ordered to recant certain of his opinions. He replied 
that he could not recant until he was convinced of his error. 
He was told that it was his duty to recant if his superiors 
required it of him, whether he was convinced or not. He re- 
fused to accept this view. In spite of the Emperor's safe con- 
duct, he was burnt alive (1415), a martyr not for any specific 
doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free conscience of 
mankind. 

It would be impossible to put the issue between priest and 
anti-priest more clearly than it was put at this trial of John 
Huss, nor to demonstrate more completely the evil spirit in 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 711 

priestcraft. A colleague of IIuss, Jerome of Prague, was burnt 
in the following year. 

These outrages were followed by an insurrection of the 
Hussites in Bohemia (1419), the first of a series of religious 
wars that marked the breaking-np of Christendom. In 1420 
the Pope, Martin V, issued a bull proclaiming a crusade "for 
the destruction of the Wycliffites, Hussites, and all other heretics 
in Bohemia," and attracted by this invitation the unemployed 
soldiers of fortune and all the drifting blackguardism of Europe 
converged upon that valiant country. They found in Bohemia, 
under its great leader Ziska, more hardship and less loot than 
crusaders were disposed to face. The Hussites were conducting 
their affairs upon extreme democratic lines, and the whole coun- 
try was aflame with enthusiasm. The crusaders beleaguered 
Prague, but failed to take it, and they experienced a series of 
reverses that ended in their retreat from Bohemia. A second 
crusade (1421) was no more successful. Two other crusades 
failed. Then unhappily the Hussites fell into internal dissen- 
sions. Encouraged by this, a fifth crusade (1431) crossed the 
frontier under Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg. 

The army of these crusaders, according to the lowest esti- 
mates, consisted of 90,000 infantry and 40,000 horsemen. At- 
tacking Bohemia from the west, they first laid siege to the town 
of Tachov, but failing to capture the strongly fortified city, they 
stormed the little town of Most, and here, as well as in the sur- 
rounding country, committed the most horrible atrocities on a 
population a large part of which was entirely innocent of any 
fonn of theology whatever. The crusaders, advancing by slow 
marches, penetrated further into Bohemia, till they reached the 
neighbourhood of the town of Domazlice (Tauss). "It was at 
three o'clock on August 14th, 1431, that the crusaders, who 
were encamped in the plain between Domazlice and Horsuv 
Tyn, received the news that the Hussites, under the leadership 
of Prokop the Great, were approaching. Though the Bohemians 
were still four miles off, the rattle of their war-wagons and the 
song, 'All ye warriors of God,' which their whole host was chant- 
ing, could already be heard." The enthusiasm of the crusaders 
evaporated with astounding rapidity. Llltzow ^ describes how 
the papal representative and the Duke of Saxony ascended a 
convenient hill to inspect the battlefield. It was, they discov- 
* Lutzow's Bohemia. 



712 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ered, not going to be a battlefield. The German camp was in 
utter confusion. Horsemen were streaming olf in every direc- 
tion, and the clatter of empty wagons being driven off almost 
drowned the sound of that terrible singing. The crusaders were 
abandoning even their loot. Came a message from the Mar- 
grave of Brandenburg advising flight ; there was no holding any 
of their troops. They were dangerous now only to their own 
side, and the papal representative spent an unpleasant night 
hiding from them in the forest. ... So ended the Bohemian 
crusade. 

In 1434 civil war again broke out among the Hussites, in 
which the extreme and most valiant section was defeated, and 
in 1436 an agreement was patched up between the Council of 
Basle and the moderate Hussites, in which the Bohemian church 
was allowed to retain certain distinctions from the general 
Catholic practice, which held good until the German Reforma- 
tion in the sixteenth century. 

§ 3 

The split among the Hussites was largely due to the drift of 
the extremer section towards a primitive communism, which 
alarmed the wealthier and more influential Czech noblemen. 
Similar tendencies had already, appeared among the English 
Wycliffites. They seem to follow naturally enough upon the 
doctrines of equal human brotherhood that emerge whenever 
there is an attempt to reach back to the fundamentals of 
Christianity. 

The development of such ideas had been greatly stimulated 
by a stupendous misfortune that had swept the world and laid 
bare the foundations of society, a pestilence of unheard-of viru- 
lence. It was called the Black Death, and it came nearer to 
the extirpation of mankind than any other evil has ever done. 
It was far more deadly than the plague of Pericles, or the 
plague of Marcus Aurelius, or the plague waves of the time of 
Justinian and Gregory the Great that paved the way for the 
Lombards in Italy. It arose in South Russia or Central Asia, 
and came by way of the Crimea and a Genoese ship to Genoa 
and Western Europe. It passed by Armenia to Asia Minor, 
Egypt, and ISTorth Africa. It reached England in 1348. Two- 
thirds of the students at Oxford died, we are told ; it is esti- 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 713 

mated that between a quarter and a half of the whole popula- 
tion of England perished at this time. Throughout all Europe 
there was as great a mortality. Hecker estimates the total as 
twenty-five million dead. It spread eastward to China, where, 
the Chinese records say, thirteen million people perished. In 
China the social disorganization led to a neglect of the river 
embankments, and as a consequence great floods devastated the 
crowded agricultural lands.^ 

Never was there so clear a warning to mankind to seek knowl- 
edge and cease from bickering, to unite against the dark powers 
of nature. All the massacres of Hulagii and Timurlane were 
as nothing to this. "Its ravages," says J. R. Green, "were 
fiercest in the greater towns, where filthy and undrained streets 
afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever. In the burial- 
ground which the piety of Sir Walter Manny purchased for 
the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked 
by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are 
said to have been interred. Thousands of people perished at 
Norwich, while in Bristol the living were hardly able to bury 
the dead. But the Black Death fell on the villages almost as 
fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the priests of 
Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Nor- 
wich two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The 
whole organization of labour was thrown out of gear. The 
scarcity of hands made it difficult for the minor tenants to per- 
form the services due for their lands, and only a temporary 
abandonment of half the rent by the landowners induced the 
farmers to refrain from the abandonment of their farms. For 
a time cultivation became im|>ossible. 'The sheep and cattle 
strayed through the fields and corn,' says a contemporary, 'and 
there were none left who could drive them.' " 

It was from these distresses that the peasant wars of the 
fourteenth century sprang. There was a great shortage of 
labour and a gTeat shortage of goods, and the rich abbots and 
monastic cultivators who owned so much of the land, and the 
nobles and rich merchants, were too ignorant of economic laws 

^Dr. C. O. Stallybrass says that this plague reached China thirty or 
forty years after its first appearance in Europe. Ibn Batuta, the Arab 
traveller who was in China fron^ 1342 to 1346, first met with it on his 
return to Damascus. The Black Death is tlie human form of a disease 
endemic among the jerboas and other small rodents in the districts round 
the head of the Caspian Sea. 



714 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




to understand that they ninst not press upon the toilers in this 
time of general distress. Thej saw their property deteriorating, 
their lands going out of cultivation, and 
they made violent statutes to compel men to 
work without any rise in wages, and to pre- 
vent their straying in search of better 
employment. Naturally enough this pro- 
voked "a new revolt against the whole sys- 
tem of social inequality which had till then 
passed unquestioned as the divine order of 
the world. The cry of the poor found a 
terrible utterance in the words of 'a mad 
priest of Kent/ as the courtly Froissart 
calls him, who for twenty years (1360- 
1381) found audience for his sermons, in 
defiance of interdict and imprisonment, in 
the stout yeomen who gathered in the Kent- 
ish churchyards. 'Mad/ as the landowners 
called him, it was in the preaching of John 
Ball that England first listened to a declara- 
tion of natural equality and the rights of 
man. 'Good people/ cried the preacher, 
'things will never go well in England so 
long as goods be not in common, and so 
long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By 
what right are they whom we call lords 
greater folk than we? On what grounds 
have they deserved it ? Why do they hold 
us in serfage ? If we all came of the same 
father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how 
can they say or prove that they are better 
tlian we, if it be not that they make us gain 
for them by our toil what they spend in 
their pride ? They are clothed in velvet and 
warm in their furs and their eraiines, while 
we are covered with rags. They have wine 
and spices and fair bread ; and we oat-cake 
and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine 
houses ; wo have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the 
fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold 
their state.' A spirit fatal to the whole system of the Middle 




RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 715^ 

Ages breathed in the popidar rhyme which condensed the 
levelling doctrine of John Ball : 'When Adam delved and Eve 
span, who was then the gentleman V " ^ 

Wat Tyler, the leader of the English insurgents, was assassi- 
nated by the Mayor of London in the presence of the yonng King 
Kichard II (1381), and his movement collapsed. The commu- 
nist side of the Hussite movement was a part of the same sys- 
tem of disturbance. A little earlier than the English outbreak 
had occurred the French '' Jacquerie" (1358), in which the 
French peasants had risen, burnt chateaux, and devastated the 
countryside. A century later the same urgency was to sweep 
Germany into a series of bloody Peasant Wars. These began 
late in the fifteenth century. Economic and religious disturb- 
ance mingled in the case of Germany even more plainly than 
in England. One conspicuous phase of these German troubles 
was the Anabaptist outbreak. The sect of the Anabaptists ap- 
peared in Wittenberg in 1521 under three "prophets," and 
broke out into insurrection in 1525. Between 1532 and 1535 
the insurgents held the town of Miinster in Westphalia, and 
did their utmost to realize their ideas of a religious communism. 
They were besieged by the Bishop of Miinster, and under the 
distresses of the siege a sort of insanity ran rife in the town ; 
cannibalism is said to have occurred, and a certain John of 
Leyden seized power, proclaimed himself the successor of King 
David, and followed that monarch's evil example by practising 
polygamy. After the surrender of the city the victorious bishop 
had the Anabaptist leaders tortured very horribly and executed 



^The seeds of conflict which grew up into the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 
were sown upon ground Avhich is strangely familiar to any writer in 1020. 
A European catastrophe had reduced production and consequently in- 
creased the earnings of workers and traders. Rural wages had risen by 
48 per cent, in England, wiien an unwise executive endeavoured to en- 
force in the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1350-51) a return to 
the pre-plague wages and prices of 1346, and aimed a blow in the Statute 
of 1378 against labour combinations. The villeins were driven to des- 
peration by the loss of their recent increase of comfort, and the outbreak 
came, as Froissart saw it from the angle of the Court, "all through the 
too great comfort of the commonalty." Other ingredients which entered 
into the outbreak were the resentment felt by the new working class at 
the restrictions imposed on its right to combine, the objection of the lower 
clergy to papal taxes, and a frank dislike of foreigners and landlords. 
There was no touch of Wycliflfe's influence in the rising. It was at its 
feeblest in Leicestershire, and it murdered one of the only other Liberal 
churchmen in England. — P. G. 



716 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

in the market-place, their mutilated bodies being hung in cages 
from a church tower to witness to all the world that decency 
and order were now restored in Miinster. . . . 

These upheavals of the common labouring men of the West- 
ern European countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 
were more serious and sustained than anything that had ever 
happened in history before. The nearest previous approach to 
them were certain communistic Muhammadan movements in 
Persia. There was a peasant revolt in Normandy about a.d. 
1000, and there were revolts of peasants (Bagaudse) in the 
later Roman Empire, but these were not nearly so formidable. 
They show a new spirit growing in human affairs, a spirit alto- 
gether different from the unquestioning apathy of the serfs and 
peasants in the original regions of civilization or from the 
anarchist hopelessness of the serf and slave labour of the Roman 
capitalists. All these early insurrections of the workers that 
we have mentioned were suppressed with much cruelty, but the 
movement itself was never completely stamped out. From that 
time to this there has been a spirit of revolt in the lower levels 
of the pyramid of civilization. There have been phases of in- 
surrection, phases of repression, phases of compromise and com- 
parative pacification ; but from that time until this, the struggle 
has never wholly ceased. We shall see it flaring out during the 
French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, insur- 
gent again in the middle and at the opening of the last quarter 
of the nineteenth century, and achieving vast pro}X)i*tions in 
the world of to-day. The socialist movement of the nineteenth 
century was only one version of that continuing revolt. 

In many countries, in France and Germany and Russia, for 
example, this labour movement Jias assumed at times an attitude 
hostile to Christianity, but there can be little doubt that this 
steady and, on the whole, growing pressure of the common man 
in the West against a life of toil and subservience is closely 
associated with Christian teaching. The church and the Chris- 
tian missionary may not have intended to spread equalitarian 
doctrines, but behind the church was the unquenchable per- 
sonality of Jesus of Nazareth, and even in spite of himself the 
[Christian preacher brought the seeds of freedom and responsi- 
bility with him, and sooner or later they shot up where he had 
been. 

This steady and growing upheaval of "Labour," its develoT>- 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 717 

ment of a consciousness of itself as a class and of a definite 
claim upon the world at large, quite as much as the presence 
of schools and universities, quite as much as abundant printed 
books and a developing and expanding process of scientific re- 
search, mark off our present type of civilization, the "modern 
civilization,'' from any pre-existing state of human society, and 
mark it, for all its incidental successes, as a thing unfinished 
and transitory. It is an embryo or it is something doomed to 
die. It may be able to solve this complex problem of co-ordi- 
nated toil and happiness, and so adjust itself to the needs of 
the human soul, or it may fail and end in a catastrophe as the 
Roman system did. It may be the opening phase of some more 
balanced and satisfying order of society, or it may be a system 
destined to disruption and replacement by some diiferently con- 
ceived method of human association. Like its predecessor, our 
present civilization may be no more than one of those crops- 
farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen 
from the air; it may have grown only that, accumulating cer- 
tain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again for better 
things to follow. Such questions as these are the practical 
realities of history, and in all that follows we shall find them 
becoming clearer and more important, until in our last chapter 
we shall end, as all our days and years end, with a recapitula- 
tion of our hopes and fears — and a note of interrogation. 



§ 4 

The development of free discussion in Europe during this age 
of fermentation was enormously stimulated by the appearance 
of printed books. It was the introduction of paper from the 
East that made practicable the long latent methotl of printing. 
It is still difficult to assign the honour of priority in the use 
of the simple expedient of printing for multipl^'ing books. It 
is a trivial question that has been preposterously debated. Ap- 
parently the glory, such as it is, belongs to Holland. In Haar- 
lem, one Coster was printing from movable type somewhen 
before 1446. Gutenberg was printing at Mainz about the same 
time. There were printers in Italy by 1465, and Caxton set 
up his press in Westminster in 1477. But long before this 
time there had been a partial use of printing. Manuscripts as 



718 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

early as the twelfth century display initial letters that may 
have been printed from wooden stamps. 

Far more important is the question of the manufacture of 
paper. It is scarcely too much to say that paper made the re- 
vival of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its 
use probably goes back to the second century b.c. In 751 the 
Chinese made an attack upon the Arab Moslems in Samarkand ; 
they were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them 
were some skilled paper-makers, from whom the art was learnt. 
Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still 
exist. The manufacture entered Christendom either through 
Greece or by the capture of Moorish paper-mills during the 
Christian reconquest of Spain. But under the Christian Span- 
ish the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper was not made 
in Christian Europe until near the end of the thirteenth century, 
and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the four- 
teenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not 
until the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough 
for the printing of books to be a practicable business proposi- 
tion. Thereupon printing followed naturally and necessarily, 
and the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far 
more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from mind 
to mind ; it became a broad flood, in which thousands and pres- 
ently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated. 

One immediate result of this achievement of printing was 
the appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world. An- 
other was a cheapening of school-books. The knowledge of 
reading spread swiftly. There was not only a great increase of 
books in the world, but the books that were now made were 
plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of toiling 
at a crabbed text and then thinking over its significance, readers 
now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase 
in the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book 
ceased to be a highly decorated toy or a scholar's mystery. Peo- 
ple began to write books to be read as well as looked at by 
ordinary people. With the fourteenth century the real history 
of the European literatures begins. We find a rapid replace- 
ment of local dialects by standard Italian, standard English, 
standard French, standard Spanish, and, later, standard Ger- 
man. These languages became literary langmages in their sev- 
eral countries ; they were tried over, polished by use, and made 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 719 

exact and vigorous. They became at last as capable of the 
burden of philosophical discussion as Greek or Latin. 



Here wo devote a section to certain elementary statements 
about the movement in men's religious ideas during the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries. They are a necessary introductiou 
to the political history of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies that follows. 

We have to distinguish clearly between two entirely different 
systems of opposition to the Catholic church. They intermingled 
very confusingly. The church was losing its hold upon the 
consciences of princes and rich and able people; it was also 
losing the faith and confidence of common people. The effect 
of its decline of spiritual power upon the former class was to 
make them resent its interference, its moral restrictions, its 
claims to overlordship, its claim to tax, and to dissolve allegi- 
ances. They ceased to respect its power and its property. This 
insubordination of princes and rulers was going on throughout 
the Middle Ages, but it was only when in the sixteenth century 
the church began to side openly with its old antagonist the 
Emperor, when it offered him its support and accepted his help 
in its campaign against heresy, that princes began to think 
seriously of breaking away from the Roman communion and 
setting up fragments of a church. And they would never have 
done so if they had not perceived that the hold of the church 
upon the masses of mankind had relaxed. 

The revolt of the princes was essentially an irreligious revolt 
against the world-rule of the church. The Emperor Frederick 
II, with his epistles to his fellow princes, was its foreiimner. 
The revolt of the people against the church, on the other hand, 
was as essentially religious. They objected not to the church's . 
power, but to its weaknesses. They wanted a deeply righteous |. 
and fearless church to help them and organize them against the | 
wickedness of powerful men. Their movements against the i 
church, within it and without, were movements not for release 
from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant 
religious control. They did not want less religious control, but 
more — but they wanted to be assured that it was religious. They 
objected to the Pope not because he was the religious head of 



720 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the world, but because he was not; because he was a wealthy 
earthly prince when he ought to have been their spiritual leader. 

The contest in Europe from the fourteenth century onward 
therefore was a three-cornered contest. The princes wanted to 
use the popular forces against the Pope, but not to let those 
forces grow too powerful for their own power and glory. For 
a long time the church went from prince to prince for an ally 
without realizing that the lost ally it needed to recover was popu- 
lar veneration. 

Because of this triple aspect of the mental and moral conflicts 
that were going on in the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, the series of ensuing changes, those changes that are 
known collectively in history as the Keforaiation, took on a 
threefold aspect. There was the Eeformation according to the 
princes, who wanted to stop the flow of money to Home and to 
seize the moral authority, the educational power, and the mate- 
rial possessions of the church within their dominions. There 
was the Keformation according to the people, who sought to 
make Christianity a power against unrighteousness, and particu- 
larly against the unrighteousness of the rich and powerful. And 
finally there was the Eeformation within the church, of which 
St. Francis of Assisi was the precursor, which sought to restore 
the goodness of the church and, through its goodness, to restore 
its power. 

The Reformation according to the princes took the form of a 
replacement of the Pope by the prince as the head of the re- 
ligion and the controller of the consciences of his people. The 
princes had no idea and no intention of letting free the judg- 
ments of their subjects more particularly with the object-lessons 
of the Hussites and the Anabaptists before their eyes ; they 
sought to establish national churches dependent upon the throne. 
As England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Ger- 
many, and Bohemia broke away from the Roman communion, 
the princes and other ministers showed the utmost solicitude 
to keep the movement well under control. Just as much refor- 
mation as would sever the link with Rome they permitted ; any- 
thing beyond that, any dangerous break towards the primitive 
teachings of Jesus or the crude direct interpretation of the 
Bible, they resisted. The Established Church of England is 
one of the most typical and successful of the resulting com- 
promises. It is still sacramental and sacerdotal ; but its organi- 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 721 

zation centres in the Court and the J.ord Chancellor, and though 
subversive views may, and do, break out in the lower and less 
prosperous ranks of its priesthood^ it is impossible for them to 
struggle up to any position of influence and authority. 

The Reformation according to the common man was very 
diiferent in spirit from the Princely Keformation. We have 
already told something of the popular attempts at Reformation 
in Bohemia and Germany. The wide spiritual upheavals of 
the time were at once more honest, more confused, more endur- 
ing, and less immediately successful than the reforms of the 
princes. Very few religious-spirited men had the daring to 
break away or the effrontery to confess that they had broken 
away from all authoritative teaching, and that they were now 
relying entirely upon their own minds and consciences. That 
required a very high intellectual courage. The general drift 
of the common man in this period in Europe was to set up 
his new acquisition, the Bible, as a counter authority to the 
church. This was particularly the case with the great leader 
of German Protestanism, Martin Luther (1483-1546). All 
over Germany, and indeed all over Western Europe, there were 
now men spelling over the black-letter pages of the newly 
translated and printed Bible, over the Book of Leviticus and 
the Song of Solomon and the Revelation of St. John the Divine 
— strange and perplexing books — quite as much as over the 
simple and inspiring record of Jesus in the Gospels. Naturally 
they produced strange views and grotesque interpretations. It 
is surprising that they were not stranger and grotesquer. But 
the human reason is an obstinate thing, and will criticize and 
select in spite of its own resolutions. The bulk of these new 
Bible students took what their consciences approved from the 
Bible and ignored its riddles and contradictions. All over 
Europe, wherever the new Protestant churches of the princes 
were set up, a living and very active residuum of Protestants 
remained who declined to have their religion made over for 
them in this fashion. These were the Nonconformists, a medley 
of sects, having nothing in common but their resistance to au- 
thoritative religion, whether of the Pope or the State.^ Most, but 
not all of these Nonconformists held to the Bible as a divinely 
inspired and authoritative guide. This was a strategic rather 

•But Noncumformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11b of this 
chapter. 



722 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



tlian an abiding position, and the modern drift of jSTonconfonn- 
ity has been onward awa}" from this original Bibliolatry towards 
a mitigated and sentimentalized recognition of the bare teach- 
ings of Jesus of ISTazareth. Beyond the range of Noncon- 
formity, beyond the range of professed Christianity at all, there 
is also now a great and growing mass of equalitarian belief and 
altruistic impnlso in the modern civilizations, which certainly 
owes, as we have already asserted, its spirit to Christianity, 
which began to appear in Europe as the church lost its grip upon 
the general mind. 

Let us say a word now of the third phase of the Eeformaticn 
process, the Eeformation within the church. This was already 
beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the ap- 
pearance of the Black and 
Grey Friars (Chap, xxxii, 
§ 13). In the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and when it was most 
needed, came a fresh im- 
petus of the same kind. This 
was the foundation of the So- 
ciety of the Jesuits by Inigo 
Lopez de Eecalde, better 
known to the world of to-day 
as St. Ignatius of Loyola. 

Ignatius began his career 

as a very tough and gallant 

young Spaniard. lie was 

clever and dexterous and in- 

passion for 




IxM^ola. 



pluck, hardihood, and rather 
were free and picturesque. 



spired by a 
showy glory. His love affairs 
In 1521 the French took the 
town of Pampeluna in Spain from the Emperor Charles Y, 
and Ignatius was one of the defenders. His legs were smashed 
by a cannon-ball, and he was taken prisoner. One leg was badly 
set and had to be broken again, and these painful and complex 
operations nearly cost him his life. He received the last sacra- 
ments. In the night, thereafter, he began to mend, and pres- 
ently he was convalescent and facing the prospect of a life in 
which he would perhaps always be a cripple. His thoughts 
turned to the adventure of religion. Sometimes he would think 
of a certain great lady, and how, in spite of his broken state, 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 723 

he might yet win her admiration by some amazing deed; and 
sometimes he would think of being in some especial and per- 
sonal way the Knight of Christ. In the midst of these con- 
fusions, one night as he lay awake, he tells ns, a new great 
lady claimed his attention ; he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin 
Mary carrying the Infant Christ in her arms. "Immediately 
a loathing seized him for the former deeds of his life." He 
resolved to give up all further thoughts of earthly women, and 
to lead a life of absolute chastity and devotion to the Mother 
of God. He projected great pilgrimages and a monastic life. 

His final method of taking his vows marks him the country- 
man of Don Quixote. He had regained his strength, and he 
was riding out into the world rather aimlessly, a penniless sol- 
dier of fortune with little but his arms and the mule on which 
he rode, when he fell into company with a Moor. They went 
on together and talked, and presently disputed about religion. 
The Moor was the better educated man ; he had the best of 
the argument, he said offensive things about the Virgin Mary 
that were difficult to answer, and he parted triumphantly from 
Ignatius. The young Knight of our Lady was boiling with 
shame and indignation. He hesitated whether he should go 
after the Moor and kill him or pursue the pilgrimage he had 
in mind. At a fork in the road he left things to his mule, 
which spared the Moor. He came to the Benedictine Abbey 
of Manresa near Montserrat, and here he imitated that peerless 
hero of the mediaeval romance, Amadis de Gaul, and kept an 
all-night vigil before the Altar of the Blessed Virgin. He pre- 
sented his mule to the abbey, he gave his worldly clothes to a 
beggar, he laid his sword and dagger upon the altar, and clothed 
himself in a rough sackcloth garment and hempen shoes. He 
then took himself to a neighbouring hospice and gave himself 
up to scourgings and austerities. For a whole week he fasted 
absolutely. Thence he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 

For some years he wandered, consumed with the idea of 
founding a new order of religious knighthood, but not knowing 
clearly how to set about this enterprise. He became more and 
more aware of his own illiteracy, and the Inquisition, which 
was beginning to take an interest in his proceedings, forbade 
him to attempt to teach others until he had spent at least four 
years in study. So much cruelty and intolerance is laid at the 
door of the Inquisition that it is pleasant to record that in its 



\ 



724 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

handling of this heady, imaginative young enthusiast it showed 
itself both sympathetic and sane. It recognized his vigour 
and possible uses; it saw the dangers of his ignorance. He 
studied at Salamanca and Paris, among other places. He was 
ordained a priest in 1538, and a year later his long-dreamt-of 
order was founded under the military title of the "Company 
of Jesus." Like the Salvation Army of modern England, it 
made the most direct attempt to bring the generous tradition 
of military organization and discipline to the service of religion. 

This Ignatius of Loyola who founded the order of Jesuits was 
a man of forty-seven ; he was a very different man, much wiser 
and steadier, than the rather absurd young man who had aped 
Amadis de Gaul and kept vigil in the abbey of Manresa ; and 
the missionary and educational organization he now created 
and placed at the disposal of the Pope was one of the most 
powerful instruments the church had ever handled. These 
men gave themselves freely and wholly to be used by the church. 
It was the Order of the Jesuits which carried Christianity to 
China again after the downfall of the Ming Dynasty, and 
Jesuits were the chief Christian missionaries in India and 
IS^oi-th America. To their civilizing work among the Indians in 
South America we shall presently allude. But their main 
achievement lay in raising the standard of Catholic education. 
Their schools became and remained for a long time the best 
schools in Christendom. Says Lord Venilam (= Sir Francis 
Bacon) : "As for the pedagogic part . . . consult the schools 
of the Jesuits, for nothing better has been put in practice." 
They raised the level of intelligence, they quickened the con- 
science of all Catholic Europe, they stimulated Protestant 
Europe to competitive educational efforts. . . . Some day it 
may be we shall see a new order of Jesuits, vowed not to the 
service of the Pope, but to the service of mankind. 

And concurrently with this great wave of educational effort, 
the tone and quality of the church was also greatly improved 
by the clarification of doctrine and the reforms in organization 
and discipline that were made by the Council of Trent. This 
council met intermittently either at Trent or Bologna between 
the years 1545 and 1563, and its work was at least as impor- 
tant as the energy of the Jesuits in arresting the crimes and 
blunders that were causing state after state to fall away from 
the Roman communion. The change wrought by the Reforma- 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 725 

tion witliin the Church of Rome was as great as the change 
wrought in the Protestant churches that detached themselves 
from the mother body. There are h(>nceforth no more open 
scandals or schisms to record. But if anything, there has been 
an intensification of doctrinal narrowness, and such phases of 
imaginative vigour as are represented by Gregory the Great, 
or by the group of Popes associated with Gregory VII and 
Urban II, or by the group that began with Innocent III, no 
longer enliven the sober and pedestrian narrative. The world 
war of 1914-1918 was a unique opportunity for the Papacy; 
the occasion was manifest for some clear strong voice proclaim- 
ing the universal obligation to righteousness, the brotherhood 
of men, the claims of human welfare over patriotic passion. 
'No such moral lead was given. The Papacy seemed to bo 
balancing its traditional reliance upon the faithful Habsburgs 
against its quarrel with republican France. 



The reader must not suppose that the destructive criticism 
of the Catholic Church and of Catholic Christianity, and the 
printing and study of the Bible, were the only or even the most 
important of the intellectual activities of the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries. That was merely the popular and most con- 
spicuous aspect of the intellectual revival of the time. Behind 
this conspicuous and popular awakening to thought and dis- 
cussion, other less immediately striking but ultimately more im- 
portant mental developments were in progress. Of the trend 
of these developments we must now give some brief indications. 
They had begun long before books were printed, but it was 
printing that released them from obscurity. 

We have already told something of the first appearance of 
the free intelligence, the spirit of inquiry and plain statement, 
in human affairs. One name is central in the record of that 
first attempt at systematic knowledge, the name of Aristotle. 
We have noted also the brief phase of scientific work at Alex- 
andria. From that time onward the complicated economic and 
political and religious conflicts of Europe and Western Asia 
impeded further intellectual progress. These regions, as we 
have seen, fell for long ages under the sway of the Oriental 
type of monarchy and of Oriental religious traditions. Rome 



V2G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tried and abandoned a slave system of industry. The first 
great capitalistic system developed and fell into chaos through 
its own inherent rottenness. Europe relapsed into universal 
insecurity. The Semite rose against the Aryan, and replaced 
Hellenic civilization throughout Western Asia and Egypt by an 
Arabic culture. All Western Asia and half of Europe fell 
under Mongolian rule. It is only in the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries that we find the Nordic intelligence struggling through 
again to expression. 

Wo then find in the growing universities of Paris, Oxford, 
and Bologna an increasing amount of philosophical discussion 
going on. In form it is chiefly a discussion of logical ques- 
tions. As the basis of this discussion we find part of the teach- 
ings of Aristotle, not the whole mass of writings he left be- 
hind him, but his logic only. Later on his work became better 
known through the Latin translations of the Arabic edition 
annotated by Averroes. Except for these translations of Aris- 
totle, and they were abominably bad translations, very little 
of the Greek philosophical literature was read in Western 
Europe until the fifteenth century. The creative Plato — as dis- 
tinguished from the scientific Aristotle — was almost unknown. 
Europe had the Greek criticism without the Greek impulse. 
Some neo-Platonic writers were known, but neo-Platonism had 
much the same relation to Plato that Christian Science has to 
Christ. 

It has been the pi-actice of recent writers to decry the phil- 
osophical discussion of the mediaeval "schoolmen" as tedious 
and futile. It was nothing of the sort. It had to retain a 
severely technical form because the dignitaries of the church, 
ignorant and intolerant, were on the watch for heresy. It 
lacked the sweet clearness, therefore, of fearless thought. It 
often hinted what it dared not say. But it dealt with funda- 
mentally important things, it was a long and necessary struggle 
to clear up and correct certain inherent defects of the human 
mind, and many people to-day blunder dangerously through 
their neglect of the issues the schoolmen discussed. 

There is a natural tendency in the human mind to exaggerate 
the differences and resemblances upon which classification is 
based, to suppose that things called by different names are alto- 
gether different, and that things called by the same name are 
practically identical. This tendency to exaggerate classification 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 727 

produces a thousand evils and injustices. In the sphere of 
race or nationality, for example, a ''European" will often treat 
an ''Asiatic" almost as if he were a different animal, while 
he will be disposed to regard another "European" as necessarily 
as virtuous and charming as himself. He will, as a matter of 
course, take sides with Europeans against Asiatics. But, as the 
reader of this history must realize, there is no such diif'erence 
as the opposition of these names implies. It is a phantom dif- 
ference created by two names. . . . 

The main mediaeval controversy was between the "Realists" 
and the "Nominalists," and it is necessary to warm the reader 
that the word "Realist" in medio?val discussion has a meaning 
almost diametrically opposed to "Realist" as it is used in the 
jargon of modern criticism. The modern "Realist" is one who 
insists on materialist details ; the mediaeval "Realist" was far 
nearer what nowadays we should call an Idealist, and his con- 
tempt for incidental detail was profound. The Realists outdid 
the vulgar tendency to exaggerate the significance of class. 
They held that there was something in a name, in a common 
noun that is, that was essentially real. For example, they 
held there was a typical "European," an ideal European, who 
was far more real than any individual European. Every 
European was, as it were, a failure, a departure, a flawed speci- 
men of this profounder reality. On the other hand the Nom- 
inalist held that the only realities in the case were the individual 
Europeans, that the name "European" was merely a name and 
nothinc: more than a name applied to all these instances. 

Nothing is quite so difficult as the compression of philo- 
sophical controversies, which are by their nature voluminous and 
various and tinted by the mental colours of a variety of minds. 
With the difi^erence of Realist and Nominalist stated baldly, 
as we have stated it here, the modern reader unaccustomed to 
philosophical discussion may be disposed to leap at once to the 
side of the Nominalist. But the matter is not so simple that 
it can be covered by one instance, and here we have purposely 
chosen an extreme instance. Names and classifications differ 
in their value and reality. While it is absurd to suppose that 
there can be much depth of class difference between men called 
Thomas and men called William, or that there is an ideal and 
quintessential Thomas or William, yet on the other hand there 
may be much profounder differences between a white man and 



728 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

a Hottentot, and still more between Homo sapiens and Homo 
neanderthalensis. While again the distinction between the class 
of pets and the class of useful animals is dependent upon very 
slight differences of habit and application, the diiference of a 
cat and dog is so profound that the microscope can trace it in 
a drop of blood or a single hair. When this aspect of the 
question is considered, it becomes understandable how Nomi- 
nalism had ultimately to abandon the idea that names were as 
insignificant as labels, and how, out of a revised and amended 
Nominalism, there grew up that systematic attempt to find the 
true — the most significant and fruitful — classification of things 
and substances which is called Scientific Research. 

And it will be almost as evident that while the tendency of 
Realism, which is the natural tendency of every untutored mind, 
was towards dogma, harsh divisions, harsh judgments, and un- 
compromising attitudes, the tendency of earlier and later Nom- 
inalism was towards qualified statements, towards an examina- 
tion of individual instances, and towards inquiry and experi- 
ment and scepticism. 

So while in the market-place and the ways of the common 
life men were questioning the morals and righteousness of the 
clergy, the good faith and propriety of their celibacy, and the 
justice of papal taxation ; while in theological circles their 
minds were set upon the question of transubstantiation, the 
question of the divinity or not of the bread and wine in the mass, 
in studies and lecture-rooms a wider-reaching criticism of the 
methods of ordinary Catholic teaching was in progress. We 
cannot attempt here to gauge the significance in this process of 
such names as Peter Abelard (1079-1142), Albertus Magnus 
(1193-1280), and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). These men 
sought to reconstruct Catholicism on a sounder system of reason- 
ing. They turned towards Nominalism. Chief among their 
critics and successors were Duns Scotus ( ?-1308), an Oxford 
Franciscan and, to judge by his sedulous thought and deliber- 
ate subtleties, a Scotchman, and Occam, an Englishman ( ?- 
1347). Both these latter, like Averroes (see Chap, xxxi., § 8), 
made a definite distinction between theological and philosophical 
truth; they placed theology on a pinnacle, but they placed it 
where it could no longer obstruct research ; Duns Scotus de- 
clared that it was impossible to prove by reasoning the exist- 
ence of God or of the Trinity or the credibility of the 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 729 

Act of Creation ; Occam was still more insistent upon this 
separation — which manifestly released scientific inquiry from 
dogmatic control. A later generation, benefiting by the free- 
doms towards which these pioneers worked, and knowing not 
the sources of its freedom, had the ingratitude to use the name 
of Scotus as a term for stupidity, and so we have our English 
word ''Dunce." Says Professor Pringle Pattison,^ "Occam, 
who is still a Scholastic, gives us the Scholastic justification 
of the spirit which had already taken hold upon Roger ])ac(>n, 
and which was to enter upon its rights in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries." 

Standing apart by himself because of his distinctive genius 
is this Roger Bacon (about 1210 to about 1293), who was also 
English. He was a Franciscan of Oxford, and a very typical 
Englishman indeed, irritable, hasty, honest, and shrewd. He 
was two centuries ahead of his world. Says H. O. Taylor of 
him ^ : 

"The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conform- 
ing to the old principles of tragic art : that the hero's character 
shall be large and noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal 
consummation must issue from character, and not happen 
through chance. He died an old man, as in his youth, so in 
his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit of a 
knowledge which was not altogether learning had been ob- 
structed by the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebel- 
lious member; quite as fatally his achievement was deformed 
from within by the principles which he accepted from his time. 
But he was responsible for his acceptance of current opinions ; 
and as his views roused the distrust of his brother Friars, his 
intractable temper drew their hostility on his head. Persuasive- 
ness and tact were needed by one who would impress such novel 
views as his upon his fellows, or, in the thirteenth century, es- 
cape persecution for-their divulgence. Bacon attacked dead and 
living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly. Of his life 
scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to him- 
self and others ; and these are insufficient for the construction 
of even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Ox- 
ford ; went to Paris, studied, experimented ; is at Oxford again, 
and a Franciscan; studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his 

' Encyclop<Bdia Britannica, article "Scholasticism." 
^The Medieval Mind, by Henry Osborn Taylor. 



730 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Order, is sent back to Paris, kept under surveillance, receives 
a letter from the Pope, writes, writes, writes — his three best- 
known works ; is again in trouble, confined for many years, 
released, and dead, so very dead, body and fame alike, until 
partly unearthed after five centuries." 

The bulk of these "three best-known works" is a hotly phrased 
and sometimes quite abusive, but entirely just attack on the 
ignorance of the times, combined with a wealth of suggestions 
for the increase of knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon 
the need of experiment and of collecting knowledge, the spirit 
of Aristotle lives again in him. "Experiment, experiment,'" 
that is the burthen of Roger Bacon. Yet of Aristotle himself 
Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him because men, in- 
stead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored over the 
bad Latin translations which were then all that was available 
of the master. "If I had my way," he wrote, in his intem- 
perate fashion, "I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the 
study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and 
increase ignorance," a sentiment that Aristotle would probably 
have echoed could he have returned to a world in which his 
works were not so much read as worshipped — and that, as 
Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable translations. 

Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of 
seeming to square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison 
and worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, "Cease to be 
ruled by dogmas and authorities; looh at the world!" Four 
chief sources of ignorance he denounced ; respect for authority, 
custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the vain proud 
unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and 
a Avorld of power would open to men : — 

"Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that 
great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be 
borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likcf- 
wise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they 
may be moved cum impetu incestimahili, as we deem the scythed 
chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying 
machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle 
turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air 
in the manner of a flying bird." 

Occam, Roger Bacon, these are the early precursors of a great 
movement in Europe away from "Realism" towards reality. 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 731 

For a time the older influences fought against the naturalism of 
the new Nominalists. In 1339 Occam's books were put under a 
ban and Nominalism solemnly condemned. As late as 1473 an 
attempt, belated and unsuccessful, was made to bind teachers 
of Paris by an oath to teach Realism. It was only in the six- 
teenth century with the printing of books and the increase of 
intelligence that the movement from absolutism towards experi- 
ment became massive, and that one investigator began to co- 
operate with another. 

Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experi- 
menting with material things was on the increase, items of 
knowledge were being won by men, but there was no inter- 
related advance. The work was done in a detached, furtive, 
and inglorious manner, A tradition of isolated investigation 
came into Europe from the Arabs, and a considerable amount 
of private and secretive research was carried on by the alche- 
mists, for whom modern writers are a little too apt with their 
contempt. These alchemists were in close touch with the glass 
and metal workers and with the herbalists and medicine-makers 
of the times ; they pried into many secrets of nature, but they 
were obsessed by "practical" ideas ; they sought not knowledge, 
but power; they wanted to find out how to manufacture gold 
from cheaper materials, how to make men immortal by the 
elixir of life, and such-like vulgar dreams. Incidentally in 
their researches they learnt much about poisons, dyes, metal- 
lurgy, and the like; they discovered various refractory sub- 
stances, and worked their way towards clear glass and so to 
lenses and optical instruments ; but as scientific men tell us 
continually, and as "practical" men still refuse to learn, it is 
only when knowledge is sought for her own sake that she gives 
rich and unexpected gifts in any abundance to her servants. 
The world of to-day is still much more disposed to spend money 
on technical research than on pure science. Half the men in 
our scientific laboratories still dream of patents and secret 
processes. We live to-day largely in the age of alchemists, for 
all our sneers at their memory. The "business man" of to-day 
still thinlvs of research as a sort of alchemy. 

Closely associated with the alchemists were the astrologers, 
who were also a "practical" race. They studied the stars — • 
to tell fortunes. They lacked that broader faith and under- 
standing which induces men simply to study the stars. 



732 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Not until the fifteenth century did the ideas which Roger 
Bacon first expressed begin to produce their first-fruits in new 
knowledge and a widening outlook. Then suddenly, as the 
sixteenth century dawned, and as the world recovered from the 
storm of social trouble that had followed the pestilences of the 
fourteenth century, Western Europe broke out into a galaxy 
of names that outshine the utmost scientific reputations of the 
best age of Greece. Nearly every nation contributed, the 
reader will note, for science knows no nationality. 

One of the earliest and most splendid in this constellation 
is the Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a man 
with an almost miraculous vision for reality. He was a nat- 
uralist, an anatomist, an engineer, as well as a very great artist. 
He was the first modern to realize the true nature of fossils,^ 
he made note-books of observations that still amaze us, he was 
eonvijiced of the practicability of mechanical flight. Another 
great name is that of Copernicus, a Pole (1473-1543), who 
made the first clear analysis of the movements of the heavenly 
bodies and showed that the earth moves round the sun. Tycho 
Brahe (1546-1601), a Dane working at the university of 
Prague, rejected this latter belief, but his observations of celes- 
tial movements were of the utmost value to his successors, 
and especially to the German, Kepler (1571-1630). Galileo 
Galilei (1564-1642) was the founder of the science of dy- 
namics. Before his time it was believed that a weight a hun- 
dred times greater than another would fall a hundred tii;nes 
as fast. Galileo denied this. Instead of arguing about it like 
a scholar and a gentleman, he put it to the coarse test of experi- 
ment by dropping two unequal weights from an upper gallery 
of the leaning tower of Pisa — to the horror of all erudite men. 
He made what was almost the first telescope, and he developed 
the astronomical views of Copernicus ; but the church, still 
struggling gallantly against the light, decided that to believe that 
the earth was smaller and inferior to the sun made man and 
Christianity of no account, and diminished the importance of 
the Pope; so Galileo, under threats of dire punishment, when 
he was an old man of sixty-nine, was made to recant this view 
and put the earth back in its place as the immovable centre of 
the universe. He knelt before ten cardinals in scarlet, an 
assembly august enough to overawe truth itself, while he 
^Cp. Chap. II, § 1, towards the end. 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 733 

amended the creation ho had disarranged. The story has it 
that as he rose from his knees, after repeating his recantation, 
he mnttered, "Eppur si Muove" — ''it moves nevertheless." 

Newton (1642-1727) was born in the year of Galileo's 
death. By his discovery of the law of gravitation he completed 
the clear vision of the starry universe that we have to-dtiy. 
But Newton carries us into the eighteenth century. He carries 
us too far for the present chapter. Among the earlier names, 
that of Dr. Gilbert (1540-1603), of Colchester, is pre-eminent. 
Roger Bacon had preached experiment, Gilbert was one of the 
first to practise it. There can be little doubt that his work, 
which was chiefly upon magnetism, helped to form the ideas of 
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626), Lord Chancellor 
to James I of England. This Francis Bacon has been called 
the "Father of Experimental Philosophy," but of his share in 
the development of scientific work far too much has been made.^ 
He was, says Sir R. A. Gregory, "not the founder but the 
apostle" of the scientific method. His greatest service to sci- 
ence was a fantastic book, The Neiv Atlantis. "In his Xeio 
Atlantis, Francis Bacon planned in somewhat fanciful lan- 
guage a palace of invention, a great temple of science, where the 
pursuit of knowledge in all its branches was to be organized 
on principles of the highest efficiency." 

From this Utopian dream arose the Royal Society of Lon- 
don, which received a Royal Charter from Charles II of Eng- 
land in 1662. The essential use and virtue of this society was 
and is puhlication. Its formation marks a definite step from 
isolated inquiry towards co-operative work, from the secret and 
solitary investigations of the alchemist to the frank report and 
open discussion which is the life of the modern scientific process. 
For the true scientific method is this: to trust no statements 
without verification, to test all things as rigorously as possible, 
to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to give out one's 
best modestly and plainly, serving no other end but knowledge. 

The long-slumbering science of anatomy was revived by Har- 
vey (1578-1657), who demonstrated the circulation of the 
blood. . . . Presently the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek (1683- 
1723) brought the first crude microscope to bear upon the hid- 
den minutiff" of life. 

These are but some of the brightest stars amidst that in- 
*See Gregory's Discovery, chap, vi, 



7S4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ci'easmg multitude of men who have from the fifteenth century 
to our own time, with more and more collective energy and 
vigour, lit up our vision of the universe, and increased our 
power over the conditions of our lives. 



We have dealt thus fully with the recrudescence of scientific 
studies in the Middle Ages because of its ultimate importance 
in human affairs. In the long run, Koger Bacon is of more 
significance to mankind than any monarch of his time. But the 
contemporary world, for the most part, knew nothing of this 
smouldering activity in studies and lecture-rooms and alchemist's 
laboratories that was presently to alter all the conditions of 
life. The church did indeed take notice of what was afoot, but 
only because of the disregard of her conclusive decisions. She 
had decided that the earth was the very centre of God's creation, 
and that the Pope was the divinely appointed ruler of the earth. 
Men's ideas on these essential points, she insisted, must not be 
disturbed by any contrary teaching. So soon, however, as she 
had compelled Galileo to say that the world did not move she 
was satisfied ; she does not seem to have realized how ominous it 
was for her that, after all, the earth did move. 

Very great social as well as intellectual developments were 
in progress in Western Europe throughout this period of the 
later Middle Ages. But the human mind apprehends events far 
more vividly than changes ; and men for the most part, then as 
now, kept on in their own traditions in spite of the shifting 
scene about them. 

In an outline such as this it is impossible to crowd in the 
clustering events of history that do not clearly show the main 
process of human development, however bright and picturesque 
they may be. We have to record the steady growth of towns 
and cities, the reviving power of trade and money, the gradual 
re-establishment of law and custom, the extension of security, 
the supersession of private warfare that went on in Western 
Europe in the period between the first crusade and the six- 
teenth century. Of much that looms large in our national 
histories we cannot tell anything. We have no space for the 
story of the repeated attempts of the English kings to conquer 
Scotland and set themselves up as kings of France, nor of how 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 735 

the ISTorman English established themselves insecurely in Ire- 
land (twelfth century), and how Wales was linked to the Eng- 
lish crown (128^2 ). All through the Middle Ages the struggle of 
England with Scotland and France was in progress; there were 
times when it seemed that Scotland was finally subjugated and 
when the English king held far more land in France than its 
titular sovereign. In the English histories this struggle with 
France is too often represented as a single-handed and almost 
successful attempt to conquer France. In reality it was a joint 
enterprise undertaken in concert first with the Flemings and 
Bavarians and afterwards with the powerful French vassal state 
of Burgimdy to conquer and divide the patrimony of Hugh 
Capet. Of the English rout by the Scotch at Bannockburn 
(1314), and of William Wallace, and Robert the Bruce, the 
Scottish national heroes, of the battles of Crecy (1346) and 
Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415) in France, which shine 
like stars in the English imagination, little battles in which 
sturdy bowmen through some sunny hours made a great havoc 
among French knights in armour, of the Black Prince 
and Henry V of England, and of how a peasant girl, Joan 
of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, drove the English out of her 
country again (1429-1430), this history relates nothing. 
For every country has such cherished national events. They 
are the ornamental tapestry of history, and no part of the 
building. Rajputana or Poland, Russia, Spain, Persia, and 
China can all match or outdo the utmost romance of western 
Europe, with equally adventurous knights and equally valiant 
princesses and equally stout fights against the odds. Nor can we 
tell how Louis XI of France (1461-1483), the son of Joan of 
Arc's Charles VII, brought Burgundy to heel and laid the 
foundations of a centralized French monarchy. It signifies 
more that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, gunpowder, 
that Mongol gift, came to Europe so that the kings (Louis XI 
included) and the law, relying upon the support of the growing 
towns, were able to batter down the castles of the half-inde- 
pendent robber knights and barons of the earlier Middle Ages 
and consolidate a more centralized power. The fighting nobles 
and knights of the barbaric period disappear slowly from his- 
tory during these centuries ; the Crusades consumed them, such 
dynastic wars as the English Wars of the Roses killed them off, 
the arrows from the English long-bow pierced them and stuck 



736 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

out a yard behind, infantry so armed swept them from the 
stricken field ; they became reconciled to trade and changed their 
nature. They disappeared in everything' but a titular sense 
from the west and south of Europe before they disappeared from 
Germany. The knight in Germany remained a professional 
fighting man into the sixteenth century. 

Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries in western 
Europe, and particularly in France and England, there sprang 
up like flowers a multitude of very distinctive and beautiful 
buildings, cathedrals, abbeys, and the like, the Gothic architec- 
ture. This lovely efflorescence marks the appearance of a body 
of craftsmen closely linked in its beginnings to the church. In 
Italy and Spain, too, the world was beginning to build freely 
and beautifully again. At first it was the wealth of the church 
that provided most of these buildings ; then kings and merchants 
also began to build. 

From the twelfth century onward, with the increase of trade, 
there was a great revival of town life throughout Europe. 
Prominent among these towns were Venice, with its dependents 
Rag-usa and Corfu, Genoa, Verona, Bologna, Pisa, Florence, 
Naples, Milan, Marseilles, Lisbon, Barcelona, Narbonne, Tours, 
Orleans, Bordeaux, Paris, Ghent, Bruges. Boulogne, London, 
Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Dover, Antwerp, Hamburg, 
Bremen, Cologne, Mayence, Nuremberg, Munich, Leipzig, Mag- 
deburg, Breslau, Stettin, Dantzig, Konigsberg, Riga, Pskof, 
Novgorod, Wisby, and Bergen. 

"A West German town, between 1400 and 1500,* embodied 
all the achievements of progress at that time, although from a 
modern standpoint much seems wanting. . . . The streets were 
mostly narrow and irregularly built, the houses chiefly of 
wood, while almost every burgher kept his cattle in the house, 
and the herd of swine which was driven every morning by the 
town herdsman to the pasture-ground formed an inevitable part 
of city life.^ In Frankfort-on-Main it was unlawful after 1481 
to keep swine in the Altstadt, but in the Neustadt and in Sach- 
senhausen this custom remained as a matter of course. It was 
only in 1645, after a corresponding attempt in 1556 had failed, 
that the swine-pens in the inner town were pulled down at 

' From Dr. Tille in Helmolt's History of the World. 

^Charles Dickens in his Amfricnn Notes mentions swine in Broadway, 
New York, in the middle nineteenth century. 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 737 

Leipzig. The rich burghers, who occasionally took part in the 
great trading companies, were conspicuously wealthy landown- 
ers, and had extensive courtyards with large barns inside the 
town walls. The most opulent of them owned those splendid 
patrician houses which we still admire even to-day. But even 
in the older towns most houses of the fifteenth century have 
disappeared ; only here and there a building with open timber- 
work and overhanging storeys, as in Bacharach or Miltenburg, 
reminds us of the style of architecture then customary in the 
houses of burghers. The great bulk of the inferior popuUition, 
who lived on mendicancy, or got a livelihood by the exercise of 
the inferior industries, inhabited squalid hovels outside the 
town; the town wall was often the only support for these 
wretched buildings. The internal fittings of the houses, even 
amongst the wealthy population, were very defective according 
to modern ideas ; the Gothic style was as little suitable for the 
petty details of objects of luxury as it was splendidly adapted 
for the building of churches and town halls. The influence 
of the Renaissance added much to the comfort of the house. 

''The fourteenth and fifteenth century saw the building of 
numerous Gothic town churches and town halls throughout Eu- 
rope which still in many cases serve their original purpose. 
The power and prosperity of the towns find their best expres- 
sion in these and in the fortifications, with their strong towers 
and gateways. Every picture of a town of the sixteenth or 
later centuries shows conspicuously these latter erections for 
the protection and honour of the town. The town did many 
things which in our time are done by the State. Social prob- 
lems were taken up by town administration or the corresponding 
municipal organization. The regulation of trade was the con- 
cern of the guilds in agreement with the council, the care of 
the poor belonged to the church, while the council looked after 
the protection of the town walls and the very necessary fire 
brigades. The council, mindful of its social duties, superin- 
tended the filling of the municipal granaries, in order to have 
supplies in years of scarcity. Such store-houses were erected 
in almost every town during the fifteenth century. Tariffs 
of prices for the sale of all wares, high enough to enable every 
artisan to make a good livelihood, and to give the purchaser a 
guarantee for the quality of the wares, were maintained. The 
town was also the chief capitalist; as a seller of annuities on 



738 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 739 

lives and inheritances it was a banker and enjoyed unlimited 
credit. In return it obtained means for the construction of 
fortifications or for such occasions as the acquisition of sover- 
eign rights from the hand of an impecunious prince." 

For the most part these European towns were independent 
or quasi-independent aristocratic republics. Most admitted a 
vague overlordship on the part of the church, or of the emperor 
or of a king. Others were parts of kingdoms, or even the 
capitals of dukes or kings. In such cases their internal free- 
dom was maintained by a royal or imperial charter. In Eng- 
land the Royal City of Westminster on the Thames stood cheek 
by jowl with the walled city of London, into which the King 
came only with ceremony and permission. The entirely free 
Venetian republic ruled an empire of dependent islands and 
trading ports, rather after the fashion of the Athenian republic. 
Genoa also stood alone. The Germanic towns of the Baltic 
and ISTorth Sea from Riga to Middelburg in Holland, Dort- 
mund, and Cologne were loosely allied in a confederation, the 
confederation of the Hansa towns, under the leadership of 
Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck, a confederation which was still 
more loosely attached to the empire. This confederation, which 
included over seventy towns in all, and which had depots in 
ISTovgorod, Bergen, London, and Bruges, did much to keep the 
northern seas clean of piracy, that curse of the Mediterranean 
and of the Eastern seas. The Eastern Empire throughout its 
last phase, from the Ottoman conquest of its European hinter- 
land in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century until its fall 
in 1453, was practically only the trading town of Constanti- 
nople, a town state like Genoa or Venice, except that it was en- 
cumbered by a corrupt imperial court. 

The fullest and most splendid developments of this city life 
of the later Middle Ages occurred in Italy. After the end of 
the Hohenstaufen line in the thirteenth century, the hold of 
the Holy Roman Empire upon North and Central Italy weak- 
ened, although, as we shall tell, German Emperors were still 
crowned as kings and emperors in Italy up to the time of 
Charles V (circ. 1530). There arose a number of quasi-inde- 
pendent city states to the north of Rome, the papal capital. 
South Italy and Sicily, however, remained under foreign domin- 
ion. Genoa and her rival, Venice, were the great trading sea- 
ports of this time; their noble palaces, their lordly paintings, 



740 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

still win our admiration, Milan, at the foot of the St. Gothard 
pass, revived to wealth and power. Inland was Florence, a 
trading and financial centre which, under the almost monarchi- 
cal rule of the Medici family in the fifteenth century, enjoyed a 
second 'Tericlean age." But already before the time of these 
cultivated Medici "bosses," Florence had produced much beau- 
tiful art. Giotto's tower (Giotto, born 12G6, died 1337) and 
the Duomo (by Brunelleseo, born 1377, died 1446) already ex- 
isted. Towards the end of the fourteenth century Florence be- 
came the centre of the rediscovery^ restoration, and imitation 
of antique art (the "Renaissance" in its narrower sense). 
Artistic productions, unlike philosophical thought and scientific 
discovery, are the ornaments and expression rather than the cre- 
ative substance of history, and here we cannot attempt to trace 
the development of the art of Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Dona- 
tello (died 1466), Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519), Michel- 
angelo (1475-1564), and Raphael (died 1520). Of the sci- 
entific speculation of Leonardo we have already bad occasion 
to speak. 

§ 8 

In 1453, as we have related, Constantinople fell. Through- 
out the next century the Turkish pressure upon Europe was 
heavy and continuous. The boundary line between Mongol 
and Aryan, which had lain somewhere east of the Pamirs in 
the days of Pericles, had receded now to Hungary. Constanti- 
nople had long been a mere island of Christians in a Turk- 
ruled Balkan peninsula. Its fall did much to interrupt the 
trade with the East. 

Of the two rival cities of the Mediterranean, Venice was 
generally on much better terms with the Turks than Genoa. 
Every intelligent Genoese sailor fretted at the trading monopoly 
of Venice, and tried to invent some way of getting through it 
or round it. And there were now new peoples taking to the sea 
trade, and disposed to look for new ways to the old markets be- 
cause the ancient routes were closed to them. The Portuguese, 
for example, were developing an Atlantic coasting trade. The 
Atlantic was waking up again after a vast period of neglect 
that dated from the Roman murder of Carthage. It is rather 
a delicate matter to decide whether the western European was 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 741 

pushing out into the Athmtic or whether he was being pushed 
out into it by the Turk, who lorded it in the Mediterranean until 
the Battle of Lepanto (157]). The Venetian and Genoese 
ships were creeping round to Antwerp, and the Hansa town 
seamen were coining south and extending their range. And 
there were considerable developments of seamanship and ship- 
building in progress. The Mediterranean is a sea for galleys 
and coasting. But upon the Atlantic Ocean and the North 
Sea winds are more prevalent, seas run higher, the shore is 
often a danger rather than a refuge. The high seas called 
for the sailing ship, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 
it appears keeping its course by the compass and the stars. 

By the thirteenth century the Hansa merchants were already 
sailing regularly from Bergen across the grey cold seas to the 
Northmen in Iceland. In Iceland men knew of Greenland, and 
adventurous voyagers had long ago found a further land be- 
yond, Vinland, where the climate was pleasant and where men 
could settle if they chose to cut themselves off from the rest of 
human kind. This Vinland was either Nova Scotia or, what 
is more probable, New England. 

All over Europe in the fifteenth century merchants and 
sailors were speculating about new ways to the East. The Por- 
tuguese, unaware that Pharaoh Necho had solved the problem 
ages ago, were asking whether it was not possible to go round 
to India by the coast of Africa. Their ships followed in the 
course that Hanno took to Cape Verde (1445). They put 
out to sea to the west and found the Canary Isles, Madeira, and 
the Azores.^ That was a fairly long stride across the Atlantic. 
In 1486 a Portuguese, Diaz, reported that he had rounded 
the south of Africa. . . . 

A certain Genoese, Christopher Columbus, began to think 
more and more of what is to us a very obvious and natural en- 
terprise, but which strained the imagination of the fifteenth 
century to the utmost, a voyage due west across the Atlantic. 
At that time nobody knew of the existence of America as a 
separate continent. Columbus knew that the world was a 
sphere, but he underestimated its size; the travels of Marco 
Polo had given him an exaggerated idea of the extent of Asia, 

* In these maritime adventures in the eastern Atlantic and the west 
African coast the Portuguese were preceded in the thirteenth, fourteenth, 
and early fifteenth centuries by Normans, Catalonians, and Genoese. 



742 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and he supposed therefore that Japan, with its reputation for 
a great wealth of gold, lay across the Atlantic in about the 
position of Mexico. He had made various voyages in the At- 
lantic ; he had been to Iceland and perhaps heard of Vinland, 
which must have greatly encouraged these ideas of his, and this 
project of sailing into the sunset became the ruling purpose 
of his life. He was a penniless man, some accounts say he was 
a bankrupt, and his only way of securing a ship was to get 
someone to entrust him with a command. He went first to 
King John II of Portugal, who listened to him, made difficul- 
ties, and then arranged for an expedition to start without his 
knowledge, a purely Portuguese expedition. This highly dip- 
lomatic attempt to steal a march on an original man failed, as it 
deserved to fail ; the crew became mutinous, the captain lost 
heart and returned (1483). Columbus then went to the Court 
of Spain. 

At first he could get no ship and no powers. Spain was 
assailing Granada, the last foothold of the Moslems in western 
Europe. Most of Spain had been recovered by the Christians 
between the eleventh and the thirteenth century ; then had come 
a pause ; and now all Spain, united by the marriage of Ferdi- 
nand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was setting itself to 
the completion of the Christian conquest. Despairing of Span- 
ish help, Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to Henry 
VII of England, but the adventure did not attract that canny 
monarch. Finally in 1492 Granada fell, and then, helped by 
some merchants of the town of Palos, Columbus got his ships, 
three ships, of which only one, the Santa Maria, of 100 tons 
burthen, was decked. The two other were open boats of half 
that tonnage. 

The little expedition — it numbered altogether eighty-eight 
men ! — went south to the Canaries, and then stood out across 
the unknown seas, in beautiful weather and with a helpful wind. 

The story of that momentous voyage of two months and nine 
days must be read in detail to be appreciated. The crew was 
full of doubts and fears ; they might, they feared, sail on for 
ever. They were comforted by seeing some birds, and later on 
by finding a pole worked with tools, and a branch with strange 
berries. At ten o'clock, on the night of October 11th, 1492, 
Columbus saw a light ahead ; the next morning land was sighted, 
and, while the day was still young, Columbus landed on the 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 743 

shores of the new world, richly apparelled and bearing the royal 
banner of Spain. . . . 

Early in 1493 Columbus returned to Europe. lie brought 
gold, cotton, strange beasts and birds, and two wild-eyed painted 
Indians to be baptized. He had not found Japan, it was 
thought, but India. The islands he had found were called there- 
fore the West Indies. The same year he sailed again with a 
great expedition of seventeen ships and fifteen thousand men, 
with the express permission of the Pope to take possession of 
these new lands for the Spanisli crown. . . . 

We cannot tell of his experiences as Governor of this Spanish 
colony, nor how he was superseded and put in chains. In a 
little while a swarm of Spanish adventurers were exploring the 
new lands. But it is interesting to note that Columbus died 
ignorant of the fact that he had discovered a new continent. 
He believed to the day of his death that he had sailed round 
the world to Asia. 

The news of his discoveries caused a great excitement through- 
out western Europe. It spurred the Portuguese to fresh at- 
tempts to reach India by the South African route. In 1497, 
Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Zanzibar, and thence, 
with an Arab pilot, he struck across the Indian Ocean to Cali- 
cut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java 
and the Moluccas. In 1519 a Portuguese sailor, Magellan, in 
the employment of the Spanish King, coasted to the south of 
South America, passed through the dark and forbidding "Strait 
of Magellan," and so came into the Pacific Ocean, which had 
already been sighted by Spanish explorers who had crossed the 
Isthmus of Panama. 

Magellan's expedition continued across the Pacific Ocean 
westward. This was a far more heroic voyage than that of 
Columbus; for eight and ninety days Magellan sailed unflinch- 
ingly over that vast, empty ocean, sighting nothing but two 
little desert islands. The crews were rotten with scurvy ; there 
was little water and that bad, and putrid biscuit te eat. Rats 
were hunted eagerly; cowhide was gnawed and sawdust de- 
voured to stay the pangs of hunger. In this state the expedi- 
tion reached the Ladrones. They discovered the Philippines, 
and here Magellan was killed in a fight with the natives. Sev- 
eral other captains were murdered. Five ships had started with 
Magellan in August 1519 and two hundred and eighty men; 



744 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

in July 1522 the Vittoria, with a remnant of one and thirty- 
men aboard, returned up the Atlantic to her anchorage near the 
Mole of Seville, in the river Guadalquivir — the first ship that 
ever circumnavigated this planet. 

The English and French and Dutch and the sailors of the 
Hansa towns came rather later into this new^ adventure of ex- 
ploration. They had not the same keen interest in the eastern 
trade. And when they did come in, their first efforts were 
directed to sailing round the north of America as Magellan 
had sailed round the south, and to sailing round the north 
of Asia as Vasco da Gama had sailed round the south of Africa. 
Both these enterprises were doomed to failure by the nature of 
things. Both in America and the East, Spain and Portugal 
had half a century's start of England and France and Holland. 
And Germany never started. The King of Spain was Emperor 
of Germany in those crucial years, and the Pope had given the 
monopoly of America to Spain, and not simply to Spain, but 
to the kingdom of Castile. This must have restrained both 
Germany and Holland at first from American adventures. The 
Hansa towns were quasi-independent ; they had no monarch be- 
hind them to support them, and no unity among themselves for 
so big an enterprise as oceanic exploration. It was the mis- 
fortune of Germany, and perhaps of the world, that, as we will 
presently tell, a stoi-m of warfare exhausted her when all the 
Western powers were going to this newly opened school of trade 
and administration upon the high seas. 

Slowly throughout the sixteenth century the immense good 
fortune of Castile unfolded itself before the dazzled eyes of 
Europe. She had found a new world, abounding in gold and 
silver and wonderful possibilities of settlement. It was all 
hers, because the Pope had said so. The Court of Rome, in 
an access of magnificence, had divided this new world of 
strange lands which was now opening out to the European im- 
agination, between the Spanish, who were to have everything 
w^est of a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and 
the Portuguese, to whom everything east of this line was given. 

At first the only people encountered by the Spaniards in 
America were savages of a Mongoloid type. Many of these 
savages were cannibals. It is a misfortune for science that 
the first Europeans to reach America were these rather incurious 
Spaniards, without any scientific passion, thirsty for gold, and 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 745 




746 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

full of the blind bigotry of a recent religious war. They made 
few intelligent obsei'\'ations of the native methods and ideas of 
these primordial people. They slaughtered them, they robbed 
them, they enslaved them, and baptized them ; but they made 
small note of the customs and motives that changed and van- 
ished under their assault. They were as destructive and reck- 
less as the British in Tasmania, who shot the last Pahpolithic 
men at sight, and put out poisoned meat for them to find. 

Great areas of the American interior were prairie land, 
whose nomadic tribes subsisted upon vast herds of the now prac- 
tically extinct bison. In their manner of life, in their painted 
garments and their free use of paint, in their general physical 
characters, these prairie Indians showed remarkable resem- 
blances to the Later Palaeolithic men of the Solutrian age in 
Europe. But they had no horses. They seem to have made no 
very great advance from that primordial state, which was prob- 
ably the state in which their ancestors had reached America. 
They had, however, a knowledge of metals, and most notably 
a free use of native copper, but no knowledge of iron. As the 
Spaniards penetrated into the continent, they found and they 
attacked, plundered, and destroyed two separate civilized sys- 
tems that had developed in America, perhaps quite independ- 
ently of the civilized systems of the old world. One of them 
was the Aztec civilization of Mexico ; the other, that of Peru. 
They had probably arisen out of the heliolithic sub-civilization 
that had drifted in canoes across the Pacific, island by island, 
step by step, age after age, from its region of origin round and 
about the Mediterranean. We have already noted one or 
two points of interest in these unique developments. Along 
their own lines these civilized peoples of America had reached 
to a state of affairs roughly parallel with the culture of pre- 
dynastic Egypt or the early Sumerian cities. Before the Az- 
tecs and the Peruvians there had been still earlier civilized 
beginnings which had either been destroyed by their successors, 
or which had failed and relapsed of their own accord. 

The Aztecs seem to have been a conquering, less civilized 
people, dominating a more civilized community, as the Aryans 
dominated Greece and North India. Their religion was a 
primitive, complex, and cniel system, in which human sacrifices 
and ceremonial cannibalism played a large part. Their minds 
were haunted by the idea of sin and the need for bloody 
propitiations. 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 747 

The Aztec civilization was destroyed by an expedition under 
Cortez. He had eleven ships, four hundred Europeans, two 
hundred Indians, sixteen horses, and fourteen guns. But in 
Yucatan he picked up a stray Spaniard who had been a captive 
with the Indians for some years, and who had more or less 
learnt various Indian languages, and knew that the Aztec rule 
was deeply resented by many of its subjects. It was in alliance 
with these that Cortez advanced over the mountains into the 
valley of Mexico (1519). How he entered Mexico, how its 
monarch, Montezuma, was killed by his own people for favour- 
ing the Spaniards, how Cortez was besieged in Mexico, and 
escaped with the loss of his guns and horses, and how after a 
terrible retreat to the coast he was able to return and subju- 
gate the whole land, is a romantic and picturesque story which 
we cannot even attempt to tell here. The population of Mexico 
to this day is largely of native blood, but Spanish has replaced 
the native languages, and such culture as exists is Catholic and 
Spanish. 

The still more curious Peruvian state fell a victim to another 
adventurer, Pizarro. He sailed from the Isthmus of Panama 
in 1530, with an expedition of a hundred and sixty-eight 
Spaniards. Like Cortez in Mexico, he availed himself of the 
native dissensions to secure possession of the doomed state. 
Like Cortez, too, who had made a captive and tool of Monte- 
zuma, he seized the Inca of Peru by treachery, and attempted 
to rule in his name. Llere again we cannot do justice to the 
tangle of subsequent events, the ill-planned insurrections of 
the natives, the arrival of Spanish reinforcements from Mexico, 
and the reduction of the state to a Spanish province. Nor can 
we tell much more of the swift spread of Spanish adventurers 
over the rest of America, outside the Portuguese reservation 
of Brazil. To begin with, each story is nearly always a story 
of adventurers and of cruelty and loot. The Spaniards ill- 
treated the natives, they quarrelled among themselves, the law 
and order of Spain were months and years away from them ; 
it was only very slowly that the phase of violence and conquest 
passed into a phase of government and settlement. But long 
before there was much order in America, a steady stream of 
gold and silver began to flow across the Atlantic to the Spanish 
government and people. 

After the first violent treasure hunt came plantation and the 



748 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



working of mines. With that arose the earliest labour difficulty 
in the new world. At first the Indians were enslaved with 
much brutality and injustice; but to the honour of the Spaniards 
this did not go uncriticized. The natives found champions, and 



TvfEXICO emd. PERU 




Ahove 3000 fuet 

r, 6O00 " 



very valiant champions, in the Dominican Order and in a 
secular priest, Las Casas, who was for a time a planter and 
slave-owner in Cuba until his conscience smote him. An im- 
portation of negro slaves from West Africa also began quite 
early in the sixteenth century. After some retrogression, 
Mexico, Brazil, and Spanish South America began to develop 
into great slave-holding, wealth-producing lands. . . . 

We cannot tell here, as we would like to do, of the fine civi- 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 749 

lizing work done in South America, and more especially among 
the natives, by the Franciscans, and presently by the Jesuits, 
who came into America in the latter half of the sixteenth cen- 
tury (after 1549). . . . 

So it was that Spain rose to a temporary power and promi- 
nence in the world's affairs. It was a very sudden and very 
memorable rise. From the eleventh century this infertile and 
corrugated peninsula had been divided against itself, its Chris- 
tian population had sustained a perpetual conflict with the 
Moors; then by what seems like an accident it achieved unity 
just in time to reap the first harvest of benefit from the discov- 
ery of America. Before that time Spain had always been a 
poor country ; it is a poor country to-day, almost its only wealth 
lies in its mines. For a century, however, through its monopy- 
oly of the gold and silver of America, it dominated the world. 
The east and centre of Europe were still overshadowed by the 
Turk and Mongol ; the discovery of America was itself a conse- 
quence of the Turkish conquests ; very largely through the Mon- 
golian inventions of compass and paper, and under the stimulus 
of travel in Asia and of the growing knowledge of eastern 
Asiatic wealth and civilization, came this astonishing blazing up 
of the mental, physical, and social energies of the "Atlantic 
fringe." For close in the wake of Portugal and Spain came 
France and England, and presently Holland, each in its turn 
taking up the role of expansion and empire overseas. The cen- 
tre of interest for European history which once lay in the Levant 
shifts now from the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea to the 
Atlantic. For some centuries the Turkish Empire and Central 
Asia and China are relatively neglected by the limelight of the 
European historian. Nevertheless, these central regions of the 
world remain central, and their welfare and participation is 
necessary to the permanent peace of mankind. 

§ 9 

And now let us consider the political consequences of this 
vast release and expansion of European ideas in de fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries with the new development of science, 
the exploration of the world, the great dissemination of knowl- 
edge through paper and printing, and the spread of a new crav- 
ing for freedom and equality. How was it affecting the men- 



750 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tality of the courts and kings that directed the formal affairs 
of mankind ? We have already shown how the hold of the 
Catholic church upon the consciences of men was weakening at 
this time. Only the Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally 
successful religious war against Islam, had any great enthusiasm 
left for the church. The Turkish conquests and the expansion 
of the known world robbed the Roman Empire of its former 
prestige of universality. The old mental and moral framework 
of Europe was breaking up. What was happening to the dukes, 
princes, and kings of the old dispensation during this age of 
change ? 

In England, as we shall tell later, very subtle and interesting 
tendencies were leading towards a new method in government, 
the method of parliament, that was to spread later on over 
nearly all the world. But of these tendencies the world at large 
was as yet practically unconscious in the sixteenth century. 

Few monarchs have left us intimate diaries ; to be a monarch 
and to be frank are incompatible feats ; monarchy is itself 
necessarily a pose. The historian is obliged to speculate about 
the contents of the head that wears a crown as best he can, No 
doubt regal psychology has varied with the ages. We have, 
however, the writings of a very able man of this period who set 
himself to study and expound the arts of kingcraft as they 
were understood in the later fifteenth century. This was the 
celebrated Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He 
was of good birth and reasonable fortune, and he had entered the 
public employment of the republic by the time he was twenty- 
five. For eighteen years he was in the Florentine diplomatic 
service; he was engaged upon a number of embassies, and in 
1500 he was sent to France to deal with the French king. 
From 1502 to 1512 he was the right-hand man of the gonfalonier 
(the life president) of Florence, Soderini. Machiavelli re- 
organized the Florentine army, wrote speeches for the gon- 
falonier, was indeed the ruling intelligence in Florentine 
affairs. When Soderini, who had leant upon the French, 
was overthrown by the Medici family whom the Spanish sup- 
ported, Machiavelli, though he tried to transfer his services to 
the victors, was tortured on the rack and expelled. He took 
up his quarters in a villa near San Casciano, twelve miles or 
so from Florence, and there entertained himself partly by 
collecting and writing salacious stories to a friend in Rome, 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 751 

and partly by writing books about Italian politics in which he 
could no longer play a part. Just as we owe Marco Polo's 
book of travels to his imprisonment, so we owe Machiavelli's 
Prince, his Florentine History, and The Art of War to his 
downfall and the boredom of San Casciano. 

The enduring value of these books lies in the clear idea they 
give us of the quality and limitations of the ruling minds of this 
age. Their atmosphere was his atmosphere. If he brought an 
exceptionally keen intelligence to their business, that merely 
throws it into a brighter light. 

His susceptible mind had been greatly impressed by the cun- 
ning, cruelty, audacity, and ambition of Caesar Borgia, the 
Duke of Valentino, in whose camp he had spent some months 
as an envoy. In his Prince he idealized this dazzling person. 
Csesar Borgia (1476-1507), the reader must understand, was 
the son of Pope Alexander VI, Eodrigo Borgia (1492-1503). 
The reader will perhaps be startled at the idea of a Pope having 
a son, but this, we must remember, was a pre-reformation Pope. 
The Papacy at this time was in a mood of moral relaxation, and 
though Alexander was, as a priest, pledged to live unmarried, 
this did not hinder him from living openly with a sort of 
unmarried wife, and devoting the resources of Christendom to 
the advancement of his family. Csesar was a youth of spirit 
even for the times in which he lived ; he had early caused his 
elder brother to be murdered^ and also the husband of his sister, 
Lucrezia. He had indeed betrayed and murdered a number of 
people. With his father's assistance he had become duke of a 
wide area of Central Italy when Machiavelli visited him. He 
had shown little or no military ability, but considerable dex- 
terity and administrative power. His magnificence was of the 
most temporary sort. When presently his father died, it col- 
lapsed like a pricked bladder. Its unsoundness was not evident 
to Machiavelli. Our chief interest in Csesar Borgia is that he 
realized Machiavelli's highest ideals of a superb and successful 
prince. 

Much has been written to show that Machiavelli had wide 
and noble intentions behind his political writings, but all such 
attempts to ennoble him will leave the sceptical reader, who in- 
sists on reading the lines instead of reading imaginary things 
between the lines of Machiavelli's work, cold towards him. This 
man manifestly had no belief in any righteousness at dll, no 



752 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

belief in a God ruling over the world or in a God in men's 
hearts, no understanding of the power of conscience in men. 
Not for him were Utopian visions of world-wide human order, 
or attempts to realize the City of God. Such things he did not 
want. It seemed to him that to get power, to gratify one's 
desires and sensibilities and hates, to swagger triumphantly in 
the world, must be the crown of human desire. Only a prince 
could fully realize such a life. Some streak of timidity or 
his sense of the poorness of his personal claims had evidently 
made him abandon such dreams for himself; but at least he 
might hope to serve a prince, to live close to the glory, to share 
the plunder and the lust and the gratified malice. He might 
even make himself indispensable ! He set himself, theref ore> to 
become an "expert" in prince-craft. He assisted Soderini to 
fail. When he was racked and rejected by the Medicis, and 
had no further hopes of being even a successful court parasite, 
he wrote these handbooks of cunning to show what a clever 
servant some prince had lost. His ruling thought, his great 
contribution to political literature, was that the moral obliga- 
tions upon ordinary men cannot bind princes. 

There is a disposition to ascribe the virtue of patriotism to 
Machiavelli because he suggested that Italy, which was weak 
and divided — she had been invaded by the Turks and saved 
from conquest only by the death of the Sultan Muhammad, and 
she was being fought over by the French and Spanish as though 
she was something inanimate^ — might be united and strong; but 
he saw in that possibility only a great opportunity for a prince. 
And he advocated a national army only because he saw tlie 
Italian method of carrying on war by hiring bands of foreign 
mercenaries was a hopeless one. At any time such troops might 
go over to a better paymaster or decide to plunder the state 
they protected. He had been deeply impressed by the victories 
of the Swiss over the Milanese, but he never fathomed the 
secret of the free spirit that made those victories possible. The 
Florentine militia he created was a complete failure. He was 
a man born blind to the qualities that make peoples free and 
nations great. 

Yet this morally blind man was living in a little world of 
morally blind men. It is clear that his style of thought was 
the style of thought of the court of his time. Behind the princes 
of the new states that had grown up out of the wreckage of 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 753 

the empire and the failure of the Church, there were every- 
where chancellors and secretaries and trusted ministers of the 
Machiavellian type. Cromwell, for instance, the minister of 
Henry VIII of England after his breach with Rome, regarded 
Machiavelli's Prince as the quintessence of political wisdom. 



SWJTZERLAI^Dy showing; principal Trasses and J^otvtcs^ 




The. EverUsting 
league, 12.gi * 

Trontiers of th£ Confed- 
eraiwn.ie'f'Cent^ mm-"' 



Mountains ahave 
6000 feet 



150 MOe^ 



When the princes were themselves sufficiently clever they, too, 
were Machiavellian. They were scheming to outdo one an- 
other, to rob weaker contemporaries, to destroy rivals, so that 
they might for a brief interval swagger. They had little or 
no vision of any scheme of human destinies greater than this 
game they played against one another. 



§ 10 

It is interesting to note that this Swiss infantry which had 
so impressed Machiavelli was no part of the princely system 
of Europe. At the very centre of the European system there 
had arisen a little confederation of free states, the Swiss Con- 



75<t THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

federation, which after some centuries of nominal adhesion to 
the Holy Roman Empire, became frankly republican in 1499. 
As early as the thirteenth century, the peasant farmers of three 
valleys round about the Lake of Lucerne took it into their 
heads that they would dispense with an overlord and manaj2;e 
their own affairs in their own fashion. Their chief trouble 
came from the claims of a noble family of the Aar valley, the 
Habsburg family. In 1245 the men of Schwyz burnt the castle 
of New Habsburg which had been set up near Lucerne to over- 
awe them ; its ruins are still to be seen there. 

This Habsburg family was a growing and acquisitive one; 
it had lands and possessions throughout Germany; and in 1273, 
after the extinction of the Hohenstaufen house, Rudolf of 
Habsburg was elected Emperor of Germany, a distinction that 
became at last practically hereditary in his family. None the 
less, the men of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden did not mean 
to be ruled by any Habsburg; they formed an Everlasting 
League in 1291, and they held their own among the mountains 
from that time onward to this day, first as free members of 
the empire and then as an absolutely independent confedera- 
tion. Of the heroic legend of William Tell we have no space 
to tell here, nor have we room in which to trace the gradual 
extension of the confederation to its present boundaries. 
Romansh, Italian, and French-speaking valleys were presently 
added to this valiant little republican group. The red cross 
flag of Geneva has become the symbol of international humanity 
in the midst of warfare. The bright and thriving cities of 
Switzerland have been a refuge for free men from a score of 
tyrannies. 

§ llA 

Most of the figures that stand out in history, do so through 
some exceptional personal quality, good or bad, that makes 
them more significant than their fellows. But there was born 
at Ghent in Belgium in 1500 a man of commonplace abilities 
and melancholy temperament, the son of a mentally defective 
mother who had been married for reasons of state, who was, 
through no fault of his own, to become the focus of the accumu- 
lating stresses of Europe. The historian must give him a quite 
unmerited and accidental prominence side by. side with such 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 755 

marked individualities as Alexander and Charlemagne and 
Frederick II. This was the Emperor Charles V. For a time 
he had an air of being the greatest monarch in Europe since 
Charlemagne. Both he and his illusory greatness were the 
results of the matrimonial statecraft of his grandfather, the 
Emperor Maximilian I (born 1459, died 1519). 

Some families have fought, others have intrigued their way 
to world power ; the Ilabsburg married their way. Maximilian 
began his career with the inheritance of the Habsburgs, Aus- 
tria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts ; he married — 
the lady's name scarcely matters to us — the ISTetherlands and 
Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his first 
wife's death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried un- 
successfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in suc- 
cession to his father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the 
duchy of Milan. Finally he married his son to the weak- 
minded daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand 
and Isabella of Columbus, who not only reigned over a freshly 
united Spain, and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the two 
Sicilies, but by virtuue of the papal gifts to Castile, over 
all America west of Brazil. So it was that Charles, his grand- 
son, inherited most of the American continent and between a 
third and a half of what the Turks had left of Europe. The 
father of Charles died in 1506, and Maximilian did his best 
to secure his grandson's election to the imperial throne. 

Charles succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506; he became 
practically king of the Spanish dominions, his mother being 
imbecile, when his grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516; and 
his grandfather Maximilian dying in 1519, he was in 1520 
elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age of 
twenty. 

His election as Emperor was opposed by the young and bril- 
liant French King, Francis I, who had succeeded to the French 
throne in 1515 at the age of twenty-one. The candidature of 
Francis was supported by Leo X (1513), who also requires 
from us the epithet brilliant. It was indeed an age of brilliant 
monarehs. It was the age of Baber in India (1526-1530) 
and Suleiman in Turkey (1520). Both Leo and Francis 
dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of 
one man as the election of Charles threatened. The only other 
monarch who seemed to matter in Europe was Henry VIII, 



756 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 757 



who had become King of England in 1509 at the age oi 
eighteen. He also offered himself as a candidate for the empire, 
and the imaginative English reader may amuse himself by 
working out the possible consequences of such an election. 
There was much scope for diplomacy in this triangle of kings. 
Charles on his way from Spain to Germany visited England 
and secured the support of Henry against Francis by bribing 
his minister. Cardinal Wolsey. Henry also made a great parade 
of friendship with Francis, there was feasting, tournaments, 
and such-like antiquated gallantries in France, in a courtly 
picnic known to historians as the Field of the Cloth of Gold 
(1520). Knighthood was 
becoming a picturesque af- 
fectation in the sixteenth 
c e n t u r y. The Emperor 
Maximilian I is still called 
"the last of the knights" by 
German historians. 

The election of Charles 
was secured, it is to be noted, 
by a vast amount of bribery. 
He had as his chief sup- 
porters and creditors the 
great German business 
house of the Fuggers. That 
large treatment of money 
and credit which we call 
finance, which had gone out 
of European political life with the collapse of the Roman 
Empire, was now coming back to power. This appearance 
of the Fuggers, whose houses and palaces outshone those of 
the emperors, marks the upward movement of forces that had 
begun two or three centuries earlier in Cahors in France and 
in Florence and other Italian towns. Money, public debts, 
and social unrest and discontent re-enter upon the miniature 
stage of this Outline. Charles V was not so much a Habsburg 
as a Fugger emperor. 

For a time this fair, not very intelligent-looking young man 
with the thick upper lip and long, clumsy chin — features which 
still afflict his descendants — was largely a puppet in the hands 
of his ministers. Able servants after the order of Machiavelli 




LtitHcr 

(after Crazu^h.) 



758 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

giiided him at first in tJie arts of kingship. Then in a slow but 
effectual way he began to assert himself. He was confronted 
at the very outset of his reign in Germany with the perplexing 
dissensions of Christendom. The revolt against the papal rule 
which had been going on since the days of IIuss and Wycliffe 
had been recently exasperated by a new and unusually cynical 
selling of indulgences to raise money for the completion of 
St. Peter's at Rome. A monk named Luther, who had been 
consecrated as a priest, who had taken to reading the Bible, and 
who, while visiting Rome on the business of his order, had been 
much shocked by the levity and worldly splendour of the 
Papacy, had come forward against these papal expedients at 
Wittenberg (1517), offering disputation and propounding cer- 
tain theses. An important controversy ensued. At first Luther 
carried on this controversy in Latin, but presently took to Ger- 
man, and speedily had the people in a ferment. Charles found 
this dispute raging when he came from Spain to Germany. He 
summoned an assembly or "diet" of the empire at Worms on 
the Rhine. To this, Luther, who had been asked to recant his 
views by Pope Leo X, and who had refused to do so, was sum- 
moned. He came, and, entirely in the spirit of Huss, refused 
to recant unless he was convinced of his error by logical argu- 
ment or the authority of Scripture. But his protectors among 
the princes were too powerful for him to suffer the fate of John 
Huss. 

Here was a perplexing situation for the young Emperor. 
There is reason to suppose that he was inclined at first to sup- 
port Luther against the Pope. Leo X had opposed the election 
of Charles, and was friendly with his rival, Francis I. But 
Charles V was not a good Machiavellian, and he had acquired 
in Spain a considerable religious sincerit3^ Lie decided against 
Luther. Many of the German princes, and especially the Elec- 
tor of Saxony, sided with the reformer. Luther went into 
hiding under the protection of the Saxon Elector, and Charles 
found himself in the presence of the opening rift that was to 
split Christendom into two contending camps. 

Close upon these disturbances, and probably connected with 
them, came a widespread peasants' revolt throughout Germany. 
This outbreak frightened Luther very effectually. He was 
shocked by its excesses, and from that time forth the Reforma- 
tion he advocated ceased to be a Reformation according to the 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 



759 



Francis I^^-^^ 


W 


^^KKh-^S&kL 


'■"=. "^ \ 



^i^iitf^ 



people iand became a Reformation according to the princes. He 
lost his conlidence in that free judgment for which he had stood 
up so manfully. 

Meanwhile Charles realized that his great empire was in very 
serious danger both from the west and from the east. On the 
west of him M^as his spirited rival, Francis I ; to the east was 
the Turk in Hungary, in alliance with Francis and clamouring 
for certain arrears of tribute 
from the Austrian dominions. 
Charles had the money and army 
of. Spain at his disposal, but it 
was extremely difficult to get any 
effective support in money from 
Germany. His grandfather had 
developed a German infantry on 
the Swiss model, very much 
upon the lines expounded in 
Machiavelli's Art of War, but 
these troops had to be paid and 
his imperial subsidies had to be 
supplemented by unsecured borrowings, which were finally to 
bring his supporters, the Fuggers, to ruin. 

On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was 
successful against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battle- 
field was north Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; 
their advances and retreats depended chiefly on the arrival of 
reinforcements. The German army invaded France, failed to 
take Marseilles, fell back into Italy, lost Milan, and was be- 
sieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and unsuccessful siege 
of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces, defeated, 
wounded, and taken prisoner. He sent back a message to his 
queen that all was "lost but honour," made a humiliating peace, 
and broke it as soon as he was liberated, so that even the salvage 
of honour was but temporary. Henry VIII and the Pope, in 
obedience to the rules of IMachiavellian strategy, now went over 
to the side of France in order to prevent Charles becoming too 
powerful. The German troops in Milan, under the Constable 
of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their 
commander into a raid upon Pome. They stormed the city and 
pillaged it (1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. 
Angelo while the looting and slaughter went on. He bought 



760 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



off the German troops at last by the payment of four hundred 
thousand ducats. Ten years of such stupid and confused light- 
ing impoverished all Europe and left the Emperor in possession 
of Milan. In 1530 he was crowned by the Pope — he was the 
last German Emperor to be crowned by the Pope — at Bologna. 
One thinks of the rather dull-looking blonde face, with its long 
lip and chin, bearing the solemn expression of one who endures 
a doubtful though probably honourable cereraony. 

Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hun- 
gary. They had defeated and killed the King of Hungary in 
1526, they held Buda-Pesth, and in 1529, as we have already 
noted, Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The 
Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his 
utmost to drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest diffi- 
culty in getting the German princes to unite even with this 
formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained 
implacable for a time, and there was a new French war ; but in 
1538 Charles w^on his rival over to a more friendly attitude by 
ravaging the south of France. Francis and Charles then formed 
an alliance against the Turk, but the Protestant princes, the 
German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome, 

had formed a league, the Schmal- 
kaldic League (named after the 
little town of Schmalkalden in 
Hesse, at which its constitution 
w^as arranged), against the Em- 
peror, and in the place of a great 
campaign to recover Hungary for 
Christendom Charles had to turn 
his mind to the gathering internal 
struggle in Germany. Of that 
stniggle he saw only the opening 
war. It was a struggle, a san- 
guinary irrational bickering of 
princes for ascendancy, now flaming into war and destruction, 
now sinking back to intrigues and diplomacies ; it was a snake's 
sack of Machiavellian policies, that was to go on writhing 
incurably right into the nineteenth century, and to waste and 
desolate Central Europe again and again. 

The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at 
work in these gathering troubles. He was for his time and sta- 





RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 761 

tion an exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken 
the religious dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring 
fragments as genuine theological differences. He gathered diets 
and councils in futile attempts at reconciliation. Formula3 and 
confessions were tried over. The student of German history 
must struggle with the details of the Religious Peace of Nurem- 
berg, the settlement at the diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of Augs- 
burg, and the like. Here we do 
but mention them as details in the 
worried life of this culminating 
emperor. As a matter of fact, 
hardly one of the multifarious 
princes and rulers in Europe 
seems to have been acting in good 
faith. The wide-spread religious 
trouble of the world, the desire 
of the common people for truth 
and social righteousness, the 
spreading knowledge of the time, 
all those things were merely coun- 
ters in the imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII 
of England, who had begun his career with a book written 
against heresy, and who had been rewarded by the Pope with 
the title of "Defender of the Faith," being anxious to divorce 
his first wife in favour of an animated young lady named Anne 
Boleyn,^ and wishing also to turn against the Emperor in 
favour of Francis I and to loot the vast wealth of the church 
in England, joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. 
Sweden, Denmark, and Norway had already gone over to the 
Protestant side. 

The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after 
the death of Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the 
incidents of the campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was 
badly beaten at Lochau. By something very like a breach of 
faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor's chief remaining antag- 
onist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks were bought 
off by the payment of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the great 
relief of the Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles 

* But he had a better reason for doing this in the fact that there was 
no heir to the throne. The Wars of the Roses, a bitter dynastic war. 
were still very vivid in the minds of English people. — F, H. H, 



762 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

got to a kind of settlement, and made his last efforts to effect 
peace where there was no peace. In 1552 all Germany was at 
war again, only a precipitate flight from Innsbruck saved 
Charles from capture, and in 1552, with the treaty of Passau, 
came another unstable equilibrium. Charles was now utterly 
weary of the cares and splendours of empire ; he had never had 
a very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent, and he 
was suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made 
over all his sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdi- 
nand, and Spain and the Netherlands he resigned to his son 
Philip. He then retired to a monastery at Yuste, among the 
oak and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the Tagus 
valley, and there he died in 1558. 

Much has been written in a sentimental vcin of this retire- 
ment, this renunciation of the world by this tired majestic 
Titan, world-weary, seeking in an austere solitude his peace 
with God. But his retreat was neither solitary nor austere; 
he had with him nearly a hundred and fifty attendants; his 
establishment had all the indulgences without the fatigues of a 
court, and Philip II was a dutiful son to whom his father's 
advice was a command. As for his austerities, let Prescott 
witness : ''In the almost daily correspondence between Quixada, 
or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is 
scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor's 
eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like 
a running commentary, on the other. It is rare that such 
topics have formed the burden of communications with the 
department of state. It must have been no easy matter for 
the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of despatches 
in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed 
together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered 
to make a detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and 
bring supplies for the royal table. On Thursdays he was to 
bring fish to serve for the jour moigre that was to follow. The 
trout in the neighbourhood Charles thought too small ; so 
others, of a larger size, were to be sent from Valladolid. Pish 
of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was anything that 
in its nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels, frogs, 
oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare. 
Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him ; 
and he regretted that he had not brought a better supply of 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 763 

these from the Low Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly 
doted." . . .1 

In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III 
granting him a dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to 
break his fast early in the morning even when he was to take 
the sacrament. 

"That Charles was not altogether unmindful of his wearing 
apparel in Yuste, may be inferred from the fact that his ward- 
robe contained no less than sixteen robes of silk and velvet, 
lined with ermine, or eider down, or the soft hair of the Bar- 
bary goat. As to the furniture and upholstery of his apart- 
ments, how little reliance is to be placed on the reports so care- 
lessly circulated about these may be gathered from a single 
glance at the inventory of his effects, prepared by Quixada 
and Gaztelu soon after their master's death. Among the items 
vve find carpets from Turkey and Alcarez, canopies of velvet 
and other stuffs, hangings of fine black cloth, which since his 
mother's death he had always chosen for his own bedroom; 
while the remaining apartments were provided with no less 
than twenty-five suits of tapestry, from the looms of Flanders, 
richly embroidered with figures of animals and with land- 
scapes." . . . "Among the different pieces of plate we find 
some of pure gold, and others especially noted for their curious 
workmanship ; and as this was an age in which the art of work- 
ing the precious metals was carried to the highest perfection, 
we cannot doubt that some of the finest specimens had come 
into the Emperor's possession. The whole amount of plate was 
estimated at between twelve and thirteen thousand ounces in 
weight." . . .2 

Charles had never acquired the habit of reading, but he 
would be read aloud to at meals after the fashion of Charle- 
magne, and would make what one narrator describes as a 
"sweet and heavenly commentary." He also amused himself 
w.ith technical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by 
attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in 
to him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly 
attached, had turned his mind towards religion, which in his 
case took a punctilious and ceremonial form ; every Friday in 
Lent he scourged himself with the rest of the monks with such 

' Prescott's Appendix to Robertson's History of Charles V. 
* Prescott. 



764 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

good will as to draw blood. These exercises and the gout 
released a bigotry in Charles that had been hitherto restrained 
by considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant 
teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. ''Tell 
the grand inquisitor and his council from me to be at their 
posts, and to lay the axe at the root of the evil before it spreads 
further," . . . He expressed a doubt whether it would not 
be well, in so black an affair, to dispense with the ordinary 
course of justice, and to show no mercy; "lest the criminal, 
if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his 
crime." He recommended, as an example, his own mode of 
proceeding in the Netherlands, "where all who remained 
obstinate in their errors were burned alive, and those who were 
admitted to penitence were beheaded." 

Among the chief pleasures of the Catholic monarch between 
meals during this time of retirement were funeral services. 
He not only attended every actual funeral that was celebrated 
at Yuste, but he had services conducted for the absent dead, 
he held a funeral service in memory of his wife on the anni- 
versary of her death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies. 
"The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of 
wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The 
brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor's 
household clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge 
catafalque, shrouded also in black, which had been raised in 
the centre of the chapel. The service for the burial of the 
dead was then performed ; and, amidst the dismal wail of the 
monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit, that it 
might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The sor- 
rowful attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their 
master's death was presented to their minds — or they were 
touched, it may be, with compassion by this pitiable display 
of weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing 
a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the 
spectator of his own obsequies ; and the doleful ceremony was 
concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of the priest, 
in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty." 

Other accounts make Charles wear a shroud and lie in the 
coffin, remaining there alone until the last mourner had left 
the chapel. 

Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And 



RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 765 

the greatness of the Holy Eoman Empire died with him. The 
Holy Roman Empire strnggled on indeed to the days of Napo- 
leon, but as an invalid and dying thing. 



§ llB 

Ferdinand, the brother of Charles V, took over his aban- 
doned work and met the German princes at the diet of Augs- 
burg in 1555. Again there was an attempt to establish a 
religious peace. Kothing could better show the quality of that 
attempted settlement and the blindness of the princes and 
statesmen concerned in it, to the deeper and broader processes 
of the time, than the form that settlement took. The recogni- 
tion of religious freedom was to apply to the states and not 
to individual citizens ; cujus regio ejus religio, "the confession 
of the subject was to he dependent on tJmt of the territorial 
lord." 

§ lie 

We have given as much attention as we have done to the 
writings of Machiavelli and to the personality of Charles V 
because they throw a flood of light upon the antagonisms of the 
next period in our history. This present chapter has told the 
story of a vast expansion of human horizons and of a great 
increase and distribution of knowledge, we have seen the con- 
science of common men awakening and intimations of a new 
and profounder social justice spreading throughout the general 
body of the Western civilization. But this process of light and 
thought was leaving courts and the political life of the world 
untouched. There is little in Machiavelli that might not have 
been written by some clever secretary in the court of Chosroes 
I or Shi Hwang-ti — or even of Sargon lor Pepi. While the 
world in everything else was moving forward, in political ideas, 
in ideas about the relationship of state to state and of sovereign 
to citizen, it was standing still. Nav, it was falling back. For 
the great idea of the Catholic Church as the world city of God 
had been destroyed in men's minds by the church itself, and 
the dream of a world imperialism had, in the person of Charles 
V, been carried in effigy through Europe to limbo. Politically 



766 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the world seemed falling back towards personal monarcliy of 
the Assyrian or Macedonian pattern. 

It is not that the newly awakened intellectual energies of 
western European men were too absorbed in theological re- 
statement, in scientific investigations, in exploration and mer- 
cantile development, to give a thought to the claims and 
responsibilities of rulers. Not only were common men drawing 
ideas of a theocratic or republican or communistic character 
from the now accessible Bible, but the renewed study of the 
Greek classics was bringing the creative and fertilizing spirit 
of Plato to bear upon the Western mind. In England Sir 
Thomas More produced a quaint imitation of Plato's Bepublic 
in his Utopia, setting out a sort of autocratic communism. In 
Naples, a century later, a certain friar Campanella was equally 
bold in his City of the Sun. But such discussions were having 
no immediate effect upon political arrangements. Compared 
with the massiveness of the task, these books do indeed seem 
poetical and scholarly and flimsy, (Yet later on the Utopia 
was to bear fruit in the English Poor Laws.) The intellectual 
and moral development of the Western mind and this drift 
towards Machiavellian monarchy in Europe were for a time 
going on concurrently in the same world, but they were going 
on almost independently. The statesmen still schemed and 
manoeuvred as if nothing grew but the power of wary and 
fortunate kings. It was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries that these two streams of tendency, the stream of 
general ideas and the drift of traditional and egoistic mon- 
archical diplomacy, interfered and came into conflict. 



XXXV 

PEIN^CES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWEES 

1. Princes and Foreign Policy. § 2. The Dutch Republic. 
§ 3. The English Republic. § 4. The Break-up and Disor- 
der of Germany. § 5. The Splendours of Grand Monarchy 
in Europe. § 6. The Growth of the Idea of Great Powers. 
§ 7. The Crowned Republic of Poland and Its Fate. § 8. 
77i6 First Scramble for Empir-e Overseas. § 9. Britain 
Dominates India. § 10. Russia's Ride to the Pacific. 
§ 11. What Gibbon Thought of the World in 1780. § 12. 
The Social Truce Draws to an End. 



IN the preceding chapter we have traced the beginnings of 
a new civilization, the civilization of the "modern" type 
which becomes at the present time world-wide. It is still 
a vast unformed thing, still only in the opening phases of 
growth and development to-day. We have seen the mediseval 
ideas of the Holy Eoman Empire and of the Eoman Church, 
as forms of universal law and order, fade in its dawn. They 
fade out, as if it were necessary in order that these 
ideas of one law and one order for all men should be 
redrawn on world-wide lines. And while in nearly every 
other field of human interest there was advance, the effacement 
of these general political ideas of the Church and Empire led 
back for a time in things political towards merely personal 
monarchy and monarchist nationalism of the Macedonian type. 
There came an interregnum, as it were, in the consolidation 
of human affairs, a phase of the type the Chinese annalists 
would call an ''Age of Confusion." This interregnum has 
lasted as long as that between the fall of the Western Empire 
and the crowning of Charlemagne in Eome. We are living 
in it to-day. It may be drawing to its close ; we cannot tell 
yet. The old leading ideas had broken down, a medley of 

767 



708 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

new and untried projects and suggestions perplexed men's 
minds and actions, and meanwhile the world at large had to 
fall back for leadership upon the ancient tradition of an indi- 
vidual prince. There was no new way clearly apparent for men 
to follow, and the prince was there. 

All over the world the close of the sixteenth century saw 
monarchy prevailing and tending towards absolutism. Ger- 
many and Italy were patchworks of autocratic princely do- 
minions, Spain was practically autocratic, the throne had never 
been so powerful in England, and as the seventeenth century 
drew on, the French monarchy gradually became the greatest 
and most consolidated power in Europe. The phases and 
fluctuations of its ascent we cannot record here. 

At every court there were groups of ministers and secretaries 
who played a Machiavellian game against their foreign rivals. 
Foreign policy is the natural employment of courts and mon- 
archies. Foreign offices are, so to speak, the leading characters 
in all the histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
They kept Europe in a fever of wars. And wars were becoming 
expensive. Armies were no longer untrained levies, no longer 
assemblies of feudal knights who brought their own horses and 
weapons and retainers with them ; they needed more and more 
artillery; they consisted of paid troops who insisted on their 
pay ; they were professional and slow and elaborate, conducting 
long sieges, necessitating elaborate fortifications. War expendi- 
ture increased everywhere and called for more and more taxa- 
tion. And here it was that these monarchies of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries came into conflict with new and 
shapeless forces of freedom in the community. In practice the 
princes found they were not masters of their subjects' lives 
or property. They found an inconvenient resistance to the 
taxation that was necessary if their diplomatic aggressions and 
alliances were to continue. Finance became an unpleasant 
spectre in every council chamber. In theory the monarch owned 
his country. James I of England (1603) declared that "As it 
is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do; so it 
is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what 
a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that." In 
practice, however, he found, and his son Charles I (1625) was 
to find still more efi^ectually, that there were in his dominions 
a great number of landlords and merchants, substantial and 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 769 

intelligent persons, who set a very definite limit to the calls 
and occasions of the monarch and his ministers. They were 
prepared to tolerate his rule if they themselves might also be 
monarchs of their lands and businesses and trades and what 
not. But not otherwise. 

Everywhere in Europe there was a parallel development. 
Beneath the kings and princes there were these lesser monarchs, 
the private owners, noblemen, wealthy citizens and the like, who 
were now offering the sovereign prince much the same resist- 
ance that the kings and princes of Germany had offered the 
Emperor. They wanted to limit taxation so far as it pressed 
upon themselves, and to be free in their own houses and estates. 
And the spread of books and reading and intercommunication 
was enabling these smaller monarchs, these monarchs of owner- 
ship, to develop such a community of ideas and such a solidarity 
of resistance as had been possible at no previous stage in the 
world's history. Everywhere they were disposed to resist the 
prince, but it was not everywhere that they found the same 
faculties for an organized resistance. The economic circum- 
stances and the political traditions of the Netherlands and 
England made those countries the first to bring this antagonism 
of monarchy and private ownership to an issue. 

At first this seventeenth-century "public," this public of 
property owners, cared very little for foreign policy. They 
did not perceive at first how it affected them. They did not 
want to be bothered with it; it was, they conceded, the affairs 
of kings and princes. They made no attempt therefore to con- 
trol foreign entanglements. But it was with the direct conse- 
quences of these entanglements that they quarrelled ; they ob- 
jected to heavy taxation, to interference with trade, to arbi- 
trary imprisonment, and to the control of consciences by the 
monarch. It was upon these questions that they joined issue 
with the Crown. 



The breaking away of the Netherlands from absolutist mon- 
archy was the beginning of a series of such conflicts through- 
out the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They varied very 
greatly in detail according to local and racial peculiarities, but 
essentiallv they were all rebellious against the idea of a pre- 



770 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

dominating personal "prince" and his religious and political 
direction. 

In the twelfth century all the lower Rhine country was 
divided up among a number of small rulers, and the popu- 
lation was a Low German one on a Celtic basis, mixed with 
subsequent Danish ingredients very similar to the English ad- 
mixture. The south-eastern fringe of it spoke French dialects ; 
the bulk, Frisian, Dutch, and other Low German languages. 
The Netherlands figured largely in the crusades. Godfrey of 
Bouillon, who took Jerusalem (First Crusade), was a Belgian; 
and the founder of the so-called Latin Dynasty of emperors in 
Constantinople (Fourth Crusade) was Baldwin of Flanders. 
(They were called Latin emperors because they were on the 
side of the Latin church.) In the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries considerable towns grew up in the Netherlands: 
Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Utrecht, Leyden, Haarlem, and so forth ; 
and these towns developed quasi-independent municipal gov- 
ernments and a class of educated townsmen. We will not 
trouble the reader with the dynastic accidents that linked the 
affairs of the Netherlands with Burgimdy (Eastern France), 
and which finally made their overlordship the inheritance of 
the Emperor Charles V. 

It was under Charles that the Protestant doctrines that now 
prevailed in Germany spread into the Netherlands. Charles 
persecuted with some vigour, but in 1556, as we have told, he 
handed over the task to his son Philip (Philip II). Philip's 
spirited foreign policy — he was carrying on a war with France 
— presently became a second source of trouble between him- 
self and the Netherlandish noblemen and townsmen, because 
he had to come to them for supplies. The great nobles, led by 
William the Silent, Prince of Orange, and the Counts of 
Egmont and Horn, made themselves the heads of a popular 
resistance, in which it is now impossible to disentangle the 
objection to taxation from the objection to religious persecu- 
tion. The great nobles were not at first Protestants. They 
became Protestants as the struggle grew in bitterness. The 
people were often bitterly Protestant. 

Philip was resolved to rule both the property and consciences 
of his Netherlanders. He sent picked Spanish troops into the 
country, and he made governor-general a nobleman named Alva, 
one of those ruthless "strong" men who wreck governments and 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 771 

monarchies. For a time he ruled the land with a hand of iron, 
but the hand of iron begets a soul of iron in the body it grips, 
and in 15<»7 the Netherlands were in open revolt. Alva mur- 
dered, sacked, and massacred — in vain. Counts Egiuont and 
Horn were executed. William the Silent became the great 
leader of the Dutch, a king de facto. For a long time, and with 
many complications, the struggle for liberty continued, and 
through it all it is noteworthy that the rebels continued to 
cling to the plea that Philip II was their king — if only he 
would be a reasonable and limited king. But the idea of 
limited monarchy was distasteful to the crowned heads 
of Europe at that time, and at last Philip drove the 
United Provinces, for which we now use the name of Holland, 
to the republican form of government. Holland, be it noted — 
not all the Netherlands; the southern Netherlands, Belgium as 
we now call that country, remained at the end of the struggle 
a Spanish possession and Catholic, 

The siege of Alkmaar (1573), as Motley ^ describes it, may 
be taken as a sample of that long and hideous conflict between 
the little Dutch people and the still vast resources of Catholic 
Imperialism. 

" 'If I take Alkmaar,' Alva wrote to Philip, 'I am resolved 
not to leave a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to 
every throat.' ... 

"And now, with the dismantled and desolate Haarlem before 
their eyes, a prophetic phantom, perhaps, of their own immi- 
nent fate, did the handful of people shut up within Alkmaar 
prepare for the worst. Their main hope lay in the friendly 
sea. The vast sluices called the Zyp, through which the inunda- 
tion of the whole northern province could be very soon effected, 
were but a few miles distant. By opening these gates, and by 
piercing a few dykes, the ocean might be made to fight for 
them. To obtain this result, however, the consent of the in- 
habitants was requisite, as the destruction of all the standing 
crops would be inevitable. The city was so closely invested, 
that it was a matter of life and death to venture forth, and it 
was difficult, therefore, to find an envoy for this hazardous 
mission. At last, a carpenter in the city, Peter Van der Mey 
by name, undertook the adventure. . . . 

"Affairs soon approached a crisis within the beleaguered city. 
* Rise of the Dutch Republic. 



772 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Daily skirmishes, without decisive results, had taken place out- 
side the walls. At last, on the 18th of September, after a 
steady cannonade of nearly twelve hours, Don Frederick, at 
three in the afternoon, ordered an assault. Notwithstanding 
his seven months' experience at Haarlem, he still believed it 
certain that he should carry Alkmaar by storm. The attack 
took place at once upon the Frisian gate and upon the red tower 
on the opposite side. Two choice regiments, recently arrived 
from Lombardy, led the onset, rending the air with their shouts 
and confident of an easy victory. They were sustained by what 
seemed an overwhelming force of disciplined troops. Yet never, 
even in the recent history of Haarlem, had an attack been re- 
ceived by more dauntless breasts. Evei-y living man was on 
the walls. The storming parties were assailed with cannon, 
with musketry, with pistols. Boiling water, pitch and oil, 
molten lead, and unslaked lime were poured upon them every 
moment. Hundreds of tarred and burning hoops were skilfully 
quoited around the necks of the soldiers, who struggled in vain 
to extricate themselves from these fiery ruffs, while as fast as 
any of the invaders planted foot upon the breach, they were 
confronted face to face with sword and dagger by the burghers, 
who hurled them headlong into the moat below. 

"Thrice was the attack renewed with ever-increasing rage — 
thrice repulsed with unflinching fortitude. The storm con- 
tinned four hours long. During all that period not one of the 
defenders left his post, till he dropped from it dead or wounded. 
. . . The trumpet of recall was sounded, and the Spaniards, 
utterly discomfited, retired from the walls, leaving at least one 
thousand dead in the trenches, while only thirteen burghers and 
twenty- four of the garrison lost their lives. . . . Ensign Solis, 
who had mounted the breach for an instant, and miraculously 
escaped with life, after having been hurled from the battle- 
ments, reported that he had seen 'neither helmet nor harness' 
as he looked down into the city: only some plain-looking peo- 
ple, generally dressed like fishermen. Yet these plain-looking 
fishermen had defeated the veterans of Alva. . - . 

"Meantime, as Governor Sonoy had opened many of the 
dykes, the land in the neighbourhood of the camp was becoming 
plashy, although as yet the threatened inundation had not taken 
place. The soldiers were already very uncomfortable and very 
refractory. The carpenter-envoy had not been idle. . . ." 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 773 

He returned with despatches for the city. By accident or 
contrivance he lost these despatches as he made his way into 
the town, so that tliey fell into Alva's hands. They contained 
a definite promise from the Duke of Orange to flood the country 
so as to drown the whole Spanish anny. Incidentally this 
would also have drowned most of the Dutch harvest and cattle. 
But Alva, when he had read these documents, did not wait for 
the opening: of any more sluices. Presently the stout men of 
Alkmaar, cheering and jeering, watched the Spaniards break- 
ing camp. . . . 

The form assumed by the government of liberated Holland 
was a patrician republic under the headship of the house of 
Orange. The States-General was far less representative of 
the whole body of citizens than was the English Parliament we 
shall next relate. 

Though the worst of the struggle was over after Alkmaar, 
Holland wa«8 not effectively independent until 1609, and its 
independence was only fully and completely recognized by the 
treaty of Westphalia in 1648. 



The open struggle of the private property owner against the 
aggressions of the "Prince" begins in England far back in the 
twelfth century. The phase in this straggle that we have to 
study now is the phase that opened with the attempts of Henry 
VII and VIII and their successors, Edward VI, Mary and 
Elizabeth, to make the government of England a "personal 
monarchy" of the continental type. It became more acute 
when, by dynastic accidents, James, King of Scotland, became 
James I, King of both Scotland and England (1603), and 
began to talk in the manner we have already quoted of his 
"divine right" to do as he pleased. But never had the path of 
English monarchy been a smooth one. In all the monarchies 
of the Northmen and Germanic invaders of the empire there 
had been a tradition of a popular assembly of influential and 
representative men to preserve their general liberties, and in 
none was it more living than in England. France had her 
tradition of the assembly of the Three Estates, Spain her Cortes, 
but the English assembly was peculiar in two respects ; that it 
had behind it a documentary declaration of certain elementary 



774 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and universal rights, and that it contained elected "Knights of 
the Shire," as well as elected burghers from the towns. The 
French and Spanish assemblies had the latter, but not the 
former element. 

These two features gave the English Parliament a peculiar 
strength in its struggle with the Throne. The document in 
question was Magna Carta, the Great Charter, a declaration 
which was forced from King John (1199-1216), the brother 
and successor of Richard Coeur de Lion (1189-99), after a 
revolt of the Barons in 1215. It rehearsed a number of funda- 
mental rights that made England a legal and not a regal state. 
It rejected the power of the king to control the personal prop- 
erty and liberty of evei-y sort of citizen — save with the consent 
of that man's equals. 

The presence of the elected shire representatives in the Eng- 
lish Parliament, the second peculiarity of the British situation, 
came about from very simple and apparently innocuous begin- 
nings. From the shires, or county divisions, knights seem to 
have been summoned to the national council to testify to the 
taxable capacity of their districts. They were sent up by the 
minor gentry, freeholders and village elders of their districts 
as early as 1254, two knights from each shire. This idea in- 
spired Simon de Montfort,^ who was in rebellion against Henry 
III, the successor of John, to summon to the national council 
two knights from each shire and two citizens from each city or 
borough. Edward I, the successor to Henry III, continued 
this practice because it seemed a convenient way of getting 
into financial touch with the growing towns. At first there was 
considerable reluctance on the parts of the knights and towns- 
men to attend Parliament, but gradually the power they pos- 
sessed of linking the redress of grievances with the granting 
of subsidies was realized. Quite early, if not from the first, 
these representatives of the general property owners in town 
and country, the Commons, sat and debated apart from the 
great Lords and Bishops. So there grew up in England a 
representative assembly, the Commons, beside an episcopal and 
patrician one, the Lords. There was no profound and funda- 
mental difference between the personnel of the two assemblies ; 
many of the knights of the shire were substantial men who 

*This is not the same Simon de Montfort as the leader of the crusades 
against the Albigenses, but his son. 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 775 

might be as wealthy and influential as peers and also the sons 
and brothers of peers, but on the whole the Commons was the 
more plebeian assembly. From the first these two assemblies, 
and especially the Commons, displayed a disposition to claim 
the entire power of taxation in the land. Gradually they ex- 
tended their purview of grievances to a criticism of all the 
affairs of the realm. We will not follow the fluctuations of 
the power and prestige of the English Parliament through the 
time of the Tudor monarchs {i.e., Henry VII and VIII, 
Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth), but it will be manifest 
from what has been said that when at last James Stuart made 
his open claim to autocracy, the English merchants, peers, and 
private gentlemen found themselves with a tried and honoured 
traditional means of resisting him such as no other people in 
Europe possessed. 

Another peculiarity of the English political conflict was its 
comparative detachment from the great struggle between Catho- 
lic and Protestant that was now being waged all over Europe. 
There were, it is true, very distinct religious issues mixed up 
in the English struggle, but upon its main lines it was a po- 
litical struggle of King against the Parliament embodying the 
class of private-property-owning citizens. Both Crown and 
people were formally reformed and Protestant. It is true that 
many people on the latter side were Protestants of a Bible- 
respecting, non-sacerdotal type, representing the reformation 
according to the peoples, and that the king was the nominal 
head of a special sacerdotal and sacramental church, the estab- 
lished Church of England, representing the reformation ac- 
cording to the princes, but this antagonism never completely 
obscured the essentials of the conflict. 

The struggle of King and Parliament had already reached 
an acute phase before the death of James I (1625), but only 
in the reign of his son Charles I did it culminate in civil war. 
Charles did exactly what one might have expected a king to do 
in such a position, in view of the lack of Parliamentary control 
over foreign policy ; he embroiled the country in a conflict with 
both Spain and France, and then came to the country for sup- 
plies in the hope that patriotic feeling would override the nor- 
mal dislike to giving him money. When Parliament refused 
supplies, he demanded loans from various subjects, and at- 
tempted similar illegal exactions. This produced from Parlia- 



776 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

merit in 1628 a very memorable document, the Petition of 
Right, citing the Great Charter and rehearsing the legal limita- 
tions upon the power of the English king, denying his right 
to levy charges upon, or to imprison, or punish anyone, or to 
quarter soldiers on the people, without due process of law. The 
Petition of Right stated the case of the English Parliament. 
The disposition to "state a case" has always been a very marked 
English characteristic. When President Wilson, during the 
Great War of 1914-18, prefaced each step in his policy by a 
"Note," he was walking in the most respectable traditions of 
the English. Charles dealt with this Parliament with a high 
hand, he dismissed it in 1629, and for eleven years he sum- 
moned no Parliament. He levied money illegally, but not 
enough for his purpose ; and realizing that the church could be 
used as an instrument of obedience, he made Laud, an aggres- 
sive high churchman, very much of a priest and a very strong 
believer in "divine right," Archbishop of Canterbury, and so 
head of the Church of England. 

■ In 1638 Charles tried to extend the half-Protestant, half- 
Catholic characteristics of the Church of England to his other 
kingdom of Scotland, where the secession from Catholicism had 
been more complete, and where a non-sacerdotal, non-sacra- 
mental form of Christianity, Presbyterianism, had been estab- 
lished as the national church. The Scotch revolted, and the 
English levies Charles raised to fight them mutinied. In- 
solvency, at all times the natural result of a "spirited" foreign 
policy, was close at hand. Charles, without money or trust- 
worthy troops, had to summon a Parliament at last in 1640. 
This Parliament, the Short Parliament, he dismissed in 
the same year; he tried a Council of Peers at York (1640). 
and then in the November of that year summoned his last 
Parliament. 

This body, the Long Parliament, assembled in the mood for 
conflict. It seized Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
charged him with treason. It published a "Grand Remon- 
strance," which was a long and full statement of its case against 
Charles. It provided by a bill for a meeting of Parliament at 
least once in three vears, whether the King siimmoned it or no. 
It prosecuted the King's chief ministers who had helped him 
to reign for so long without Parliament, and in particular the 
Earl of Strafford. To save Strafford the King plotted for a 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 777 

sudden seizure of London by the army. This was discovered, 
and the Bill for Stratford's condemnation was hurried on in 
the midst of a vast popular excitement. Charles I, who was 
probably one of the meanest and most treacherous occupants 
the English throne has ever known, was frightened by the Lon- 
don crowds. Before Strafford could die by due legal process, 
it was necessary for the King to give his assent. Charles gave 
it — and Strafford was beheaded. Meanwhile the King was plot- 
ting and looking for help in strange quarters — from the Catho- 
lic Irish, from treasonable Scotchmen. Finally he resorted to 
a forcible-feeble display of violence. He went down to the 
Houses of Parliament to arrest five of his most active oppo- 
nents. He entered the House of Commons and took the 
Speaker's chair. He was prepared with some bold speech about 
treason, but when he saw the places of his five antagonists 
vacant, he was baffled, confused, and spoke in broken sentences. 
He learnt that they had departed from his royal city of West- 
minster and taken refuge in the city of London (see Chap. XXIV, 
§7). London defied him. A week later the Five ^Icmbers 
were escorted back in triumph to the Parliament House in 
Westminster by the Trained Bands of London, and the King, 
to avoid the noise and hostility of the occasion, left Whitehall 
for Windsor. 

Both parties then prepared openly for war. 

The King was the traditional head of the army, and the 
habit of obedience in soldiers is to the King. The Parliament 
had the greater resources. The King set up his standard at 
Nottingham on the eve of a dark and stormy August day in 
1642. There followed a long and obstinate civil war, the King 
holding Oxford, the Parliament, London. Success swayed 
from side to side, but the King could never close on London 
nor Parliament take Oxford. Each antagonist was weakened 
by moderate adherents who "did not want to go too far." There 
emerged among the Parliamentary commanders a certain Oliver 
Cromwell, who had raised a small troop of horse and who rose 
to the position of general. Lord Warwick, his contemporary, 
describes him as a plain man, in a cloth suit "made by an ill 
country tailor." He was no mere fighting soldier, but a mili- 
tary organizer; he realized the inferior quality of many of the 
Parliamentary forces, and set himself to remedy it. The 
Cavaliers of the King had the picturesque tradition of chivalry 



778 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and loyalty on their side ; Parliament was something new and 
difficult — without any comparable traditions. "Your troops are 
most of them old decayed serving men and tapsters," said Crom- 
well. "Do you think that the spirits of such base and mean 
fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have 
honour and courage and resolution in them V But there is 
something better and stronger than picturesque chivalry in 
the world, religious enthusiasm. He set himself to get to- 
gether a "godly" regiment. They were to be earnest, sober- 
living men. Above all, they were to be men of strong convic- 
tions. He disregarded all social traditions, and drew his officers 
from every class. "I had rather have a plain, russet-coated 
captain that hnows luhat he fights for and loves what he knows, 
than what you call a gentleman and is nothing else." England 
discovered a new force, the Ironsides, in its midst, in which 
footmen, draymen, and ships' captains held high command, 
side by side with men of family. They became the type on 
which the Parliament sought to reconstruct its entire army. 
The Ironsides were the backbone of this "New Model." Prom 
Marston Moor to ^Naseby these men swept the Cavaliers 
before them. The King was at last a captive in the hands of 
Parliament. 

There were still attempts at settlement that would have left 
the King a sort of king, but Charles was a man doomed to tragic 
issues, incessantly scheming, "so false a man that he is not to 
be trusted." The English were drifting towards a situation 
new in the world's history, in which a monarch should be 
formally tried for treason to his people and condemned. 

Most revolutions are precipitated, as this English one was, 
by the excesses of the ruler, and by attempts at strength and 
firmness beyond the compass of the law; and most revolutions 
swing by a kind of necessity towards an extremer conclusion 
than is warranted by the original quarrel. The English revolu- 
tion was no exception. The English are by nature a compro- 
mising and even a vacillating people, and probably the great 
majority of them still wanted the King to be King and the 
people to be free, and all the lions and lambs to lie down to- 
gether in peace and libert3^ But the army of the New Model 
could not go back. There would have been scant mercy for 
these draymen and footmen who had ridden down the King's 
gentlemen if the King came back. When Parliament began 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 779 

to treat again with this regal trickster, the New Model inter- 
vened ; Colonel Pride turned out eighty members from the 
House of Commons who favoured the King, and the illegal 
residue, the Kump Parliament, then put the King on trial. 

But indeed the King was already doomed. The House of 
Lords rejected the ordinance for the trial, and the Rump then 
proclaimed "that the People are, under God, the original of 
all just power," and that "the Commons of England . . . have 
the supreme power in this nation," and — assuming that it was 
itself the Commons — proceeded with the trial. The King was 
condemned as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy of his 
country." He was taken one January morning in 1649 to a 
scaffold erected outside the windows of his own banqueting- 
room at Whitehall. There he was beheaded. He died with 
piety and a certain noble self-pity — eight years after the execu- 
tion of Strafford, and after six and a half years of a destructive 
civil war which had been caused almost entirely by his own 
lawlessness. 

This was indeed a great and terrifying thing that Parliament 
had done. The like of it had never been heard of in the world 
before. Kings had killed each other times enough; parricide, 
fratricide, assassination, those are the privileged expedients 
of princes ; but that a section of the people should rise up, try 
its king solemnly and deliberately for disloyalty, mischief, and 
treachery, and condemn and kill him, sent horror through every 
court in Europe. The Rump Parliament had gone beyond 
the ideas and conscience of its time. It was as if a committee 
of jungle deer had taken and killed a tiger — a crime against 
nature. The Tsar of Russia chased the English envoy from 
his court. France and Holland committed acts of open hos- 
tility. England, confused and conscience-stricken at her own 
sacrilege, stood isolated before the world. 

But for a time the personal quality of Oliver Cromwell and 
the discipline and strength of the army he had created main- 
tained England in the republican course she had taken. The 
Irish Catholics had made a massacre of the Protestant English 
in Ireland, and now Cromwell suppressed the Irish insurrec- 
tion with great vigour. Except for certain friars at the storm 
of Drogheda, none but men with arms in their hands were killed 
by his troops ; but the atrocities of the massacre were fresh in 
his mind, no quarter was given in battle, and so his memory 



780 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

still rankles in the minds of the Irish, who have a long memory 
for their own wrongs. After Ireland came Scotland, where 
Cromwell shattered a Royalist army at the Battle of Dunbar 
(1650). Then he turned his attention to Holland, which coun- 
try had rashly seized upon the divisions among the English as 
an excuse for the injury of a trade rival. The Dutch were then 
the rulers of the sea, and the English fleet fought against odds; 
but after a series of obstinate sea fights the Dutch were driven 
from the British seas and the English took their place as the 
ascendant naval power. Dutch and French ships must dip 
their flags to them. An English fleet went into the Mediter- 
ranean — the first English naval force to enter those waters ; it 
put right various gi'ievances of the English shippers with Tus- 
cany and Malta, and bombarded the pirate nest of Algiers and 
destroyed the pirate fleet — which in the lax days of Charles had 
been wont to come right up to the coasts of Cornwall and Devon 
to intercept ships and carry off slaves to Africa. The strong 
arm of England also intei-vened to protect the Protestants in the 
south of France, who were being hunted to death by the Duke 
of Savoy. France, Sweden, Denmark, all found it wiser to 
overcome their first distaste for regicide and allied themselves 
with England. Came a war with Spain, and the great English 
Admiral Blake destroyed the Spanish Plate Fleet at Teneriffe 
in an action of almost incredible daring. He engaged land 
batteries. He was the first man "that brought ships to contemn 
castles on the shore." (He died in 1G5T, and was buried in 
Westminster Abbey, but after the restoration of the monarchy 
his bones were dug out by the order of Charles II, and removed 
to St. Margaret's, Westminster.) Such was the figin-e that 
England cut in the eyes of the world during her brief republican 
days. 

On September 3rd, 1658, Cromwell died in the midst of a 
great storm that did not fail to impress the superstitious. Once 
his strong hand lay still, England fell away from this premature 
attempt to realize a righteous commonweal of free men. In 
1660 Charles II, the son of Charles the "Martyr," was wel- 
comed back to England with all those manifestations of personal 
loyalty dear to the English heart, and the country relaxed from 
its military and naval efiiciency as a sleeper might wake and 
stretch and yawn after too intense a dream. The Puritans 
were done with. "Merrie England" was herself again, and in 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 781 

1667 the Dutch, once more masters of the sea, sailed up the 
Thames to Gravesend and burnt an English fleet in the Med- 
way. '^On the night when our ships were burnt by the Dutch," 
says Pepys, in his diary, "the King did sup with my Lady 
Castelmaine, and there they were all mad, hunting a poor 
moth." Charles, from the date of his return, 1G60, took con- 
trol of the foreign affairs of the state, and in 1670 concluded a 
secret treaty with Louis XIV of France by which he undertook 
to subordinate entirely English foreign policy to that of France 
for an annual pension of £100,000. Dunkirk, which Cromwell 
had taken, had already been sold back to France. The King 
was a great sportsman ; he had the true English love for watch- 
ing horse races, and the racing centre at Newmarket is perhaps 
his most characteristic monument. 

While Charles lived, his easy humour enabled him to retain 
the British crown, but he did so by wariness and compromise, 
and when in 1685 he was succeeded by his brother James II, 
who was a devout Catholic, and too dull to recognize the hidden 
limitation of the monarchy in Britain, the old issue between 
Parliament and Crown became acute. James set himself to 
force his country into a religious reunion with Rome. In 1688 
he was in flight to France, But this time the great lords and 
merchants and gentlemen were too circumspect to let this revolt 
against the King fling them into the hands of a second Pride 
or a second Cromwell. They had already called in another king, 
William, Prince of Orange, to replace James. The change was 
made rapidly. There was no civil war — except in Ireland — 
and no release of the deeper revolutionary forces of the country. 

Of William's claim to the throne, or rather of his wife Mary's 
claim, we cannot tell here, its interest is purely technical, nor 
how William III and Mary ruled, nor how, after the widower 
William had reigned alone for a time, the throne passed on to 
Mary's sister Anne (1702-14). Anne seems to have thought 
favourably of a restoration of the Stuart line, but the Lords and 
the Commons, who now dominated English affairs, preferred a 
less competent king. Some sort of claim could be made out 
for the Elector of Hanover, who became King of England as 
George I (1714-27). He was entirely Gennan, he could 
speak no English, and he brought a swarm of German women 
and German attendants to the English court ; a dullness, a tar- 
nish, came over the intellectual life of the land with his coming, 



782 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

but this isolation of the court from English life was his con- 
clusive recommendation to the great landowners and the com- 
mercial interests who chiefly brought him over. England en- 
tered upon a phase which Lord Beaconsfield has called the 
*' Venetian oligarchy" stage ; the supreme power resided in Par- 
liament, dominated now by the Lords, for the art of bribery 
and a study of the methods of working elections carried to a 
high pitch by Sir Robert Walpole had robbed the House of Com- 
mons of its original freedom and vigour. By ingenious de- 
vices the parliamentary vote was restricted to a shrinking 
number of electors, old towns with little or no population would 
return one or two members (old Sarum had one non-resident 
voter, no population, and two members), while newer populous 
centres had no representation at all. And by insisting upon a 
high property qualification for members, the chance of the 
Commons speaking in common accents of vulgar needs was still 
more restricted. George I was followed by the very similar 
George II (1727-60), and it was only at his death that Eng- 
land had again a king who had been born in England, and one 
who could speak English fairly well, his grandson George III. 
On this monarch's attempt to recover some of the larger powers 
of monarchy we shall have something to say in a later section. 
Such briefly is the story of the struggle in England during 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the three main 
factors in the problem of the "modern state" ; between the crown, 
the private property owners, and that vague power, still blind 
and ignorant, the power of the quite common people. This 
latter factor appears as yet only at moments when the country 
is most deeply stirred ; then it sinks back into the depths. But 
the end of the story, thus far, is a very complete triumph of the 
British private property owner over the dreams and schemes of 
Machiavellian absolutism. With the Hanoverian Dynasty, Eng- 
land became — as the Times recently styled her — a "crowned 
republic." She had worked out a new method of government, 
Parliamentary government, recalling in many ways the Senate 
and Popular Assembly of Rome, but more steadfast and efficient 
because of its use, however restricted, of the representative 
method. Her assembly at Westminster was to become the 
"Mother of Parliaments" throughout the world. Towards the 
crown the English Parliament has held and still holds much 
the relation of the mayor of the palace to the Merovingian 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 783 

kings. The king is conceived of as ceremonial and irresponsible, 
a living symbol of the royal and imperial system. But much 
power remains latent in the tradition and prestige of the crown, 
and the succession of the four Hanoverian Georcjes, William 
IV (1830), Victoria (1837), Edward VII (1901), and the 
present king, George V (1910), is of a quite different strain 
from the feeble and short-lived Merovingian monarchs. In the 
affairs of the church, the military and naval organizations, and 
the foreign office, these sovereigns have all in various degrees 
exercised an influence which is none the less important because 
it is indefinable. 

§ 4 

Upon no part of Europe did the collapse of the idea of a 
unified Christendom bring more disastrous consequences than 
to Germany. Naturally one would have supposed that the 
Emperor, being by origin a German, both in the case of the 
earlier lines and in the case of the Habsburgs, would have 
developed into the national monarch of a united German-speak- 
ing state. It was the accidental misfortune of Germany that 
her Emperors never remained German. Frederick II, the last 
Hohenstaufen, was, as we have seen, a half-Orientalized 
Sicilian ; the Habsburgs, by marriage and inclination, became 
in the person of Charles V, first Burgundian and then Spanish 
in spirit. After the death of Charles V, his brother Ferdinand 
took Austria and the empire, and his son Philip II took Spain, 
the Netherlands, and South Italy ; but the Austrian line, ob- 
stinately Catholic, holding its patrimony mostly on the eastern 
frontiers, deeply entangled therefore with Hungarian affairs 
and paying tribute, as Ferdinand and his two successors did, 
to the Turk, retained no grip upon the north Germans with 
their disposition towards Protestantism, their Baltic and west- 
ward affinities, and their ignorance of or indifference to the 
Turkish danger. 

The sovereign princes, dvikes, electors, prince bishops and the 
like, whose domains cut up the map of the Germany of the 
Middle Ages into a crazy patchwork, were really not the equiva- 
lents of the kings of England and France. They were rather 
on the level of the great land-owning dukes and peers of France 
and England. Until 1701 none of them had the title of ^'Kins;." 



784 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Many of their dominions were less both in size and value than 
the larger estates of the British nobility. The German Diet was 
like the States-General or like a parliament without the pres- 
ence of elected representatives. So that the great civil war in 
Germany that presently broke out, the Thirty Years' War 




(1618-48) was in its essential nature much more closely 
akin to the civil war in England (1643-49) and to the war of 
the Fronde (1648-53), the league of feudal nobles against the 
Crown in France, than appears upon the surface. In all these 
cases the Crown was either Catholic or disposed to be- 
come Catholic, and the recalcitrant nobles found their in- 
dividualistic disposition tending to a Protestant formula. 
But while in England and Holland the Protestant nobles and 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 785 

rich merchants ultimately triumphed and in France the suc- 
cess of the Crown was even more complete, in Germany 
neither was the Emperor strong enough, nor had the Protestant 
princes a sufficient unity and organization among themselves 
to secure a conclusive triumph. It ended there in a torn-up 
Germany. Moreover, the German issue was complicated by 
the fact that various non-German peoples, the Bohemians and 
the Swedes (who had a new Protestant monarchy which had 
arisen under Gustava Vasa as a direct result of the Eeforma- 
tion), were entangled in the struggle. Finally, the French 
monarchy, triumphant now over its own nobles, although it was 
Catholic, came in on the Protestant side with the evident inten- 
tion of taking the place of the Habsburgs as the imperial line. 
The prolongation of the war, and the fact that it was not 
fought along a deteraiinate frontier, but all over an empire of 
patches, Protestant here. Catholic there, made it one of the most 
cruel and destructive that Europe had known since the days 
of the barbarian raids. Its peculiar mischief lay not in the 
fighting, but in the concomitants of the fighting. It came at a 
time when military tactics had developed to a point that ren- 
dered ordinary levies useless against trained professional in- 
fantry. Volley firing with muskets at a range of a few score 
yards had abolished the individualistic knight in armour, but 
the charge of disciplined masses of cavalry could still disperse 
any infantry that had not been drilled into a mechanical rigidity.- 
The infantry with their muzzle-loading muskets could not keep 
up a steady enough fire to wither determined cavalry before it 
charged home. They had, therefore, to meet the shock standing 
or kneeling behind a bristling wall of pikes or bayonets. For 
this they needed great discipline and experience. Iron cannon 
were still of small size and not very abundant, and they did 
not play a decisive part as yet in warfare. They could "plough 
lanes" in infantry, but they could not easily smash and scatter 
it if it was sturdy and well drilled. War under these conditions 
was entirely in the hands of seasoned professional soldiers, and 
the question of their pay was as important a one to the generals 
of that time as the question of food or munitions. As the long 
struggle dragged on from phase to phase, and the financial dis- 
tress of the land increased, the commanders of both sides were 
forced to fall back upon the looting of towns and villages, both 
for supply and to make up the arrears of their soldiers' pay. 



786 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The soldiers became, therefore, more and more mere brigands 
living on the country, and the Thirty Years' War set up a 
tradition of looting as a legitimate operation in warfare and of 
outrage as a soldier's privilege that has tainted the good name 
of Germany right down to the Great War of 1914. The earlier 
chapters of Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, with its vivid de- 
scription of the massacre and burning of Magdeburg, will give 
the readei' a far better idea of the warfare of this time than any 
formal history. So harried was the land that the farmers 
ceased from cultivation, what snatch crops could be harvested 
were hidden away, and great crowds of starving women and 
children became camp followers of the armies, and supplied a 
thievish tail to the rougher plundering. At the close of the 
struggle all Germany was rained and desolate. Central Europe 
did not fully recover from these robberies and devastations for 
a century. 

Here we can but name Tilly and Wallenstein^ the great plun- 
der captains on the Habsburg side, and Gustavus Adolphus, the 
King of Sweden, the Lion of the North, the champion of the 
Protestants, whose dream was to make the Baltic Sea a "Swed- 
ish Lake." Gustavus Adolphus was killed in his decisive victory 
over Wallenstein at Liitzen (1632), and Wallenstein was mur- 
dered in 1G34. In 1648 the princes and diplomatists gathered 
amidst the havoc they had made to patch up the affairs of 
Central Europe at the Peace of Westphalia. By that peace the 
power of the Emperor was reduced to a shadow, and the ac- 
quisition of Alsace brought France up to the Rhine. And one 
German prince, the Ilohenzollern Elector of Brandenburg, ac- 
quired so much territory as to become the greatest German 
power next to the Emperor, a power that presently (1701) be- 
came the kingdom of Prussia. The Treaty also recognized two 
long accomplished facts, the separation from the empire and the 
complete independence of both Holland and Switzerland. 

§ 5 

We have opened this chapter with the stories of two countries, 
the Netherlands and Britain, in which the resistance of the 
private citizen to this new type of monarchy, the Machiavellian 
monarchy, that was arising out of the moral collapse of Chris- 
tendom, succeeded. But in France, Russia, in many parts of 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 



787 



Germany and of Italy — Saxony and Tuscany e.g. — personal 
monarchy was not so restrained and overthrown ; it established 
itself indeed as the ruling European system during the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries. And even in Holland and 
Britain the monarchy was recovering power during the eight- 
eenth century. 

(In Poland condi- 
tions were peculiar, and 
they will be dealt with 
in a later section.) 

In France there had 
been no Magna Carta, 
and there was not quite 
so definite and eft'ective 
a tradition of parlia- 
mentary rule. There 
was the same opposition 
of interests between the 
crown on the one hand 
and the landlords and 
merchants on the other, 
but the latter had no 
recognized gathering- 
place, and no dignified 
method of unity. They 
formed oppositions to 
the crown, they made 
leagues of resistance — 
such was the "Fronde," 
which was struggling 
against the young King 
Louis XIV and his 
great minister Mazarin, 
while Charles I was 
fighting for his life in England — but ultimately (1652), after 
a civil war, they were conclusively defeated; and while in 
England after the establishment of the Hanoverians the House 
of Lords and their subservient Commons niled the country, 
in France, on the contrary, after 1652, the court entirely domi- 
nated the aristocracy. Cardinal Mazarin was himself building 
upon a foundation that Cardinal Richelieu, the contemporary 




788 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of King James I of England, had prepared for him. After the 
time of Mazarin we hear of no great French nobles unless they 
are at court as court servants and officials. They have heen 
tamed — but at a price, the price of throwing the burthen of 
taxation upon the voiceless mass of the common people. From 
many taxes both the clergy and the nobility — everyone indeed 
who bore a title — were exempt. In the end this injustice be- 
came intolerable, but for a while the French monarchy flour- 
ished like the Psalmist's green bay tree. By the opening of 
the eighteenth century English writers are already calling at- 
tention to the misery of the French lower classes and the com- 
parative prosperity, at that time, of the English poor. 

On such terms of unrighteousness what we may call ''Grand 
Monarchy" established itself in France. Louis XIV, styled the 
Grand Monarque, reigned for the unparalleled length of seventy- 
two years (1643-1715), and set a pattern for all the kings of 
Europe. At first he was guided by his Machiavellian minister, 
Cardinal Mazarin; after the death of the Cardinal he himself 
in his own proper person became the ideal "Prince." He was, 
within his limitations, an exceptionally capable king ; his ambi- 
tion was stronger than his baser passions, and he guided his 
country towards bankruptcy, through the complication of a 
spirited foreign policy, with an elaborate dignity that still ex- 
torts our admiration. His immediate desire was to consolidate 
and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb 
the Spanish Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French 
kings as the possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast 
Holy Roman Empire. He made bribery a state method almost 
more important than warfare. Charles II of England was in 
his pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility, presently to 
be described. His money, or rather the money of the tax-pay- 
ing classes in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing oc- 
cupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles, with 
its salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains 
and parks and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the 
world. He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and 
princelet in Europe was building his own Versailles as much 
beyond his means as his subjects and credits would permit. 
Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or extended their chateaux to 
the new pattern. A great industry of beautiful and elaborate 
fabrics and furnishings developed. The luxurious arts flour- 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 789 

ished everywhere ; sculpture iu alabaster, faience, gilt woodwork, 
metal work, stamped leather, much music, magnihceut paint- 
ing, beautiful printing and bindings, fine cookery, tine vin- 
tages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture went a strange 
race of "gentlemen" in vast powdered wigs, silks and laces, 
poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing canes; and 
still more wonderful "ladies," under towers of powdered hair 
and wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. 
Through it all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, 
unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched 
him from those lower darknesses to which his sunshine did not 
penetrate. 

We cannot give here at any length the stoiy of the wars and 
doings of this monarch. In many ways Voltaire's Siecle de 
Louis XIV is still the best and most wholesome account. He 
created a French navy fit to face the English and Dutch ; a 
very considerable achievement. But because his intelligence 
did not rise above the lure of that Fata Morgana, that crack 
in the political wits of Europe, the dream of a world-wide 
Holy Eoman Empire, he drifted in his later years to the pro- 
pitiation of the Papacy, which had hitherto been hostile to him. 
He set himself against those spirits of independence and dis- 
union, the Protestant princes, and he made war against Protes- 
tantism in France. Great numbers of his most sober and val- 
uable subjects were driven abroad by his religious persecutions, 
taking arts and industries with them. The English silk manu- 
facture, for instance, was founded by French Protestants. 
Under his rule were carried out the "dragonnades," a pecu- 
liarly malignant and effectual form of persecution. Eough sol- 
diers were quartered in the houses of the Protestants, and were 
free to disorder the life of their hosts and insult their woman- 
kind as they thought fit. Men yielded to that sort of pressure 
who would not have yielded to rack and fire. The education 
of the next generation of Protestants was broken up, and the 
parents had to give Catholic instruction or none. They gave it, 
no doubt, with a sneer and an intonation that destroyed all faith 
in it. While more tolerant countries became mainly sincerely 
Catholic or sincerely Protestant, the persecuting countries, like 
France and Spain and Italy, so destroyed honest Protestant 
teaching that these peoples became mainly Catholic believers or 
Catholic atheists, ready to break out into blank atheism when- 



790 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 791 

ever the opportunity offered. The next reign, that of Louis 
XV, was the age of that supreme mocker, Voltaire (1694- 
1778), an age in which everybody in French society conformed 
to the Koman church and hardly anyone believed in it. 

It was part — and an excellent part — of the pose of Grand 
Monarchy to patronize literature and the sciences. Louis XIV 
set up an academy of sciences in rivalry with the English Royal 
Society of Charles II and the similar association at Florence. 
He decorated his court with poets, playwrights, philosophers, and 
scientific men. If the scientific process got little inspiration 
from this patronage, it did at any rate acquire resources for 
experiment and publication, and a certain prestige in the eyes 
of the vulgar. 

Louis XV was the great-grandson of Louis XIV, and an in- 
competent imitator of his predecessor's magnificence. He posed 
as a king, but his ruling passion was that common obsession of 
our kind, the pursuit of women, tempered by a superstitious 
fear of hell. How such women as the Duchess of Chateau- 
roux, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame du Barry domi- 
nated the pleasures of the king, and how wars and alliances 
were made, provinces devastated, thousands of people killed, 
because of the vanities and spites of these creatures, and how 
all the public life of France and Europe was tainted with in- 
trigue and prostitution and imposture because of them, the 
reader must learn from the memoirs of the time. The spirited 
foreign policy went on steadily under Louis XV towards its 
final smash. 

In 1774 this Louis, Louis the Well-Beloved, as his flatterers 
called him, died of smallpox, and was succeeded by his grand- 
son, Louis XVI (1774-93), a dull, well-meaning man, an excel- 
lent shot, and an amateur locksmith of some ingenuity. Of 
how he came to follow Charles I to the scaffold we shall tell in 
a later section. Our present concern is with Grand Monarchy 
in the days of its glory. 

Among the chief practitioners of Grand Monarchy outside 
France we may note first the Prussian kings, Frederick William 
I (1713-40), and his son and successor, Frederick II, Fred- 
erick the Great (1740-86). The story of the slow rise of the 
Hohenzollern family, which ruled the kingdom of Prussia, from 
inconspicuous beginnings is too tedious and unimportant for us 
to follow here. It is a story of luck and violence, of bold claims 



792 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and sudden betrayals. It is told with great appreciation in 
Carlyle's Frederick the Great. By the eighteenth century the 
Prussian kingdom was important enough to threaten the em- 
pire; it had a strong, well-drilled army, and its king was an 
attentive and worthy student of Machiavelli. Frederick the 
Great perfected his Versailles at Potsdam. There the park of 
Sans Souci, with its fountains, avenues, statuary, aped its 
model; there also was the Xew Palace, a vast brick building 
erected at enormous expense, the Orangery in the Italian style, 
with a collection of pictures, a Marble Palace, and so on. 
Frederick carried culture to the pitch of authorship, and 
corresponded with and entertained Voltaire, to their mutual 
exasperation. 

The Austrian dominions were kept too busy between the 
hammer of the French and the anvil of the Turks to develop the 
real Grand Monarch style until the reign of Maria Theresa 
(who, being a woman, did not bear the title of Empress) (1740- 
80). Joseph II, who was Emperor from 1765-92, succeeded 
to her palaces in 1780. 

With Peter the Great (1682-1725) the empire of Muscovy 
broke away from her Tartar traditions and entered the sphere 
of French attraction. Peter shaved the Oriental beards of his 
nobles and introduced Western costume. These were but the 
outward and visible symbols of his westering tendencies. To 
release himself from the Asiatic feeling and traditions of 
Moscow, which, like Pekin, has a sacred inner city, the Krem- 
lin, he built himself a new capital, Petrograd, upon the swamp 
of the ISTeva. And of course he built his Versailles, the Peter- 
hof, about eighteen miles from this new Paris, employing a 
French architect and having a terrace, fountains, cascades, 
picture gallery, park, and all the recognized features. His 
more distinguished successors were Elizabeth (1741-62) and 
Catherine the Great, a German princess, who, after obtaining 
the crown in sound Oriental fashion through the murder of 
her husband, the legitimate Tsar, reverted to advanced Western 
ideals and ruled with great vigour from 1762 to 1796. She 
set up an academy, and corresponded with Voltaire. And she 
lived to witness the end of the system of Grand Monarchy in 
Europe and the execution of Louis XVI. 

We cannot even catalogue here the minor Grand Monarchs 
of the time in Florence (Tuscany) and Savoy and Saxony and 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 79S 

Denmark and Sweden. Versailles, under a score of names, is 
starred in every volume of Baedeker, and the tourist gapes in 
their palaces. Nor can we deal with the war of the Spanish 
Succession. Spain, overstrained by the imperial enterprises of 
Charles V and Philip II, and enfeebled by a bigoted persecution 
of Protestants, Moslems, and Jews, was throughout the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries sinking down from her tempo- 
rary importance in European affairs to the level of a secondary 
power again. 

These European raonarchs ruled their kingdoms as their 
noblemen ruled their estates: they plotted against one another, 
they were politic and far-seeing in an unreal fashion, they 
made wars, they spent the substance of Europe upon absurd 
"policies" of aggression and resistance. At last there burst 
upon them a great storm out of the depths. That storm, the 
First French Revolution, the indignation of the common man 
in Europe, took their system unaAvares. It was but the open- 
ing outbreak of a great cycle of political and social storms that 
still continue, that will perhaps continue until every vestige 
of nationalist monarchy has been swept out of the world and 
the skies clear again for the great peace of the federation of 
mankind. 

§ 6 

We have seen how the idea of a world-rule and a community 
of mankind first came into human affairs, and we have traced 
how the failure of the Christian churches to sustain and estab- 
lish those conceptions of its founder, led to a moral collapse in 
political affairs and a reversion to egotism and want of faith. 
We have seen how Machiavellian monarchy set itself up against 
the spirit of brotherhood in Christendom, and how Machiavellian 
monarchy developed throughout a large part of Europe into 
the Grand Monarchies and Parliamentary Monarchies of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the mind and imag- 
ination of man is incessantly active, and beneath the sway of 
the grand monarchs, a complex of notions and traditions was 
being woven as a net is woven, to catch and entangle men's 
minds, the conception of international politics not as a matter 
of dealings between princes, but as a matter of dealings be- 
tween a kind of immortal Beings, the Powers. The Princes 



794 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

came and went ; a Louis XIV would be followed by a petticoat- 
hunting Louis XV, and be again by that dull-witted amateur 
locksmith, Louis XVL Peter the Great gave place to a suc- 
cession of empresses; the chief continuity of the Habsburgs 
after Charles V, either in Austria or Spain, was a continuity 
of thick lips, clumsy chins, and superstition ; the amiable scoun- 
drelism of a Charles II would make a mock of his own preten- 
sions. But what remained much more steadfast were the secre- 
tariats of the foreign ministries and the ideas of people who 
wrote of state concerns. The ministers maintained a con- 
tinuity of policy during the "off days" of their monarchs, and 
between one monarch and another. 

So we find that the prince gradually became less important 
in men's minds than the "Power" of which he was the head. 
We begin to read less and less of the schemes and ambitions of 
King This or That, and more of the "Designs of France" or 
the "Ambitions of Prussia." In an age when religious faith 
was declining, we find men displaying a new and vivid belief in 
the reality of these personifications. These vast vague phan- 
toms, the "Powers," crept insensibly into European political 
thought, until in the later eighteenth and in the nineteenth 
centuries they dominated it entirely. To this day they domi- 
nate it. European life remained nominally Christian, but to 
worship one God in spirit and in truth is to belong to one 
community with all one^s fellow worshippers. In practical 
reality Europe does not do this, she has given herself up alto- 
gether to the worship of this strange state mythology. To these 
sovereign deities, to the unity of "Italy," to the hegemony of 
"Prussia," to the glory of "France," and the destinies of "Rus- 
sia," she has sacrificed many generations of possible unity, 
peace, and prosperity and the lives of millions of men. 

To regard a tribe or a state as a sort of personality is a 
very old disposition of the human mind. The Bible abounds 
in such personifications. Judah, Edom, Moab, Assyria, figure 
in the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were individuals ; it is 
sometimes impossible to say whether the Hebrew writer is deal- 
ing with a person or with a nation. It is manifestly a primitive 
and natural tendency. But in the case of modem Europe it 
is a retrocession. Europe, under the idea of Christendom, 
had gone far towards unification. And while such tribal per- 
sons as "Israel" or "Tyre" did represent a certain community 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 795 

of blood, a certain uniformity of type, and a homogeneity of 
interest, the European powers which arose in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries were entirely fictitious unities. Rus- 
sia was in truth an assembly of the most incongruous elements, 
Cossacks, Tartars, Ukrainians, Muscovites, and, after the time 
of Peter, Esthonians and Lithuanians ; the France of Louis XV 
comprehended German Alsace and freshly assimilated regions 
of Burgundy; it was a prison of suppressed Huguenots and a 
sweating-house for peasants. In "Britain," England carried 
on her back the Hanoverian dominions in Germany, Scotland, 
the profoundly alien Welsh and the hostile and Catholic Irish. 
Such powers as Sweden, Prussia, and still more so Poland and 
Austria, if we watch them in a series of historical maps, con- 
tract, expand, thrust out extensions, and wander over the map 
of Europe as ama?b8e do under the microscope. . . . 

If we consider the psychology of international relationship as 
we see it manifested in the world about us, and as it is shown 
by the development of the "Power" idea in modern Europe, 
we shall realize certain historically very important facts about 
the nature of man. Aristotle said that man is a political ani- 
mal, but in our modern sense of the word politics, which now 
covers world-politics, he is nothing of the sort. He has still the 
instincts of the family tribe, and beyond that he has a disposi- 
tion to attach himself and his family to something larger, to 
a tribe, a city, a nation, or a state. But that disposition, left 
to itself, is a vague and very uncritical disposition. If any- 
thing, he is inclined to fear and dislike criticism of this some- 
thing larger that encloses his life and to which he has given 
himself, and to avoid such criticism. Perhaps he has a sub- 
conscious fear of the isolation that may ensue if the system is 
broken or discredited. He takes the milieu in which he finds 
himself for granted ; he accepts his city or his government, just 
as he accepts the nose or the digestion which fortune has be- 
stowed upon him. But men's loyalties, the sides they take in 
political things, are not innate, they are educational results. 
For most men their education in these matters is the silent, 
continuous education of things about them. Men find them- 
selves a part of Merry England or Holy Russia ; they grow up 
into these devotions ; they accept them as a part of their nature. 

It is only slowly that the world is beginning to realize how 
profoundly the tacit education of circumstances can be supple- 



796 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

mented, modified, or corrected by positive teaching, by litera- 
ture, discussion, and properly criticized experience. The real 
life of the ordinary man is his everyday life, his little circle of 
affections, fears, hungers, lusts, and imaginative impulses. It 
is only when his attention is directed to political affairs as 
something vitally affecting this personal circle, that he brings 
his reluctant mind to bear upon them. It is scarcely too much to 
say that the ordinary man thinks as little about political matters 
as he can, and stops thinking about them as soon as possible. 
It is still only very curious and exceptional minds, or minds 
that have by example or good education acquired the scientific 
habit of wanting to know why, or minds shocked and distressed 
by some public catastro-phe and roused to wide apprehensions of 
danger, that will not accept governments and institutions, how- 
ever preposterous, that do not directly annoy them, as satis- 
factory. The ordinary human being, until he is so aroused, will 
acquiesce in any collective activities that are going on in this 
world in which he finds himself, and any phrasing or symboliza- 
tion that meets his vague need for something greater to which 
his personal affairs, his individual circle, can be anchored. 

If we keep these manifest limitations of our nature in mind, 
it no longer becomes a mystery how, as the idea of Christianity 
as a world brotherhood of men sank into discredit because of 
its fatal entanglement with priestcraft and the Papacy on the 
one hand and with the authority of princes on the other, and 
the age of faith passed into our present age of doubt and dis- 
belief, men shifted the reference of their lives from the kingdom 
of God and the brotherhood of mankind to these apparently 
more living realities, France and England, Holy Russia, Spain, 
Prussia, which were at least embodied in active courts, which 
maintained laws, exerted power through armies and navies, 
waved flags with a compelling solemnity, and were self-asser- 
tivo and insatiably greedy in an entirely human and understand- 
able fashion. Certainly such men as Cardinal Richelieu and 
Cardinal Mazarin thought of themselves as serving greater ends 
than their own or their monarch's; they served the quasi-divine 
France of their imaginations. And as certainly these habits 
of mind percolated down from them to their subordinates and 
to the general body of the population. In the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries the general population of Europe was re- 
ligious and only vaguely patriotic; by the nineteenth it had 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 797 

become wholly patriotic. In a crowded Enolisli or French or 
German railway carriage of the later nineteenth century it would 
have aroused far less hostility to have jeered at God than to 
have jeered at one of those strange beings, England or France 
or Germany. To these things men's minds clung, and they 
clung to them because in all the world there appeared nothing 
else so satisfying to cling to. They were the real and living 
gods of Europe. 

This idealization of governments and foreign offices, this 
mythology' of "Powers" and their loves and hates and conflicts, 
has so obsessed the imaginations of Europe and Western Asia as 
to provide it with its "forms of thought." N'early all the his- 
tories, nearly all the political literature of the last two centuries 
in Europe, have been written in its phraseology. Yet a time 
is coming when a clear-sighted generation will read with per- 
plexity how in the community of western Europe, consisting 
everywhere of very slight variations of a common racial mixture 
of N'ordic and Iberian peoples and immigrant Semitic and Mon- 
golian elements, speaking nearly everywhere modifications of 
the same Aryan speech, having a common past in the Koman 
Empire, common religious forms, common social usages, and a 
common art and science, and intermarrying so freely that no one 
could tell with certainty the ''nationality" of any of his great- 
grandchildren, men could be moved to the wildest excitement 
upon the question of the ascendancy of "France," the rise and 
unification of "Germany," the rival claims of "Russia" and 
"Greece" to possess Constantinople. These conflicts will seem 
then as reasonless and insane as those dead, now incomprehensi- 
ble feuds of the "greens" and "blues" that once filled the streets 
of Byzantium with shouting and bloodshed. 

Tremendously as these phantoms, the Powers, rule our minds 
and lives to-day, they are, as this history shows clearly, things 
only of the last few centuries, a mere hour, an incidental phase, 
in the vast deliberate history of our kind. They mark a phase 
of relapse, a backwater, as the rise of Machiavellian monarchy 
marks a backwater ; they are part of the same eddy of faltering 
faith, in a process altogether greater and altogether different 
in its general tendency, the process of the moral and intellectual 
reunion of mankind. For a time men have relapsed upon these 
national or imperial gods of theirs; it is but for a time. The 
idea of the world state, the universal kingdom of righteousness 



798 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of which every living soul shall he a citizen, was already in the 
world two thousand years ago never more to leave it. Men 
know that it is present even when they refuse to recognize it. 
In the writings and talk of men about international affairs to- 
day, in the current discussions of historians and political jour- 
nalists, there is an effect of drunken men growing sober, and 
terribly afraid of growing sober. They still talk loudly of their 
''love" for France, of their "hatred" of Germany, of the ''tra- 
ditional ascendancy of Britain at sea," and so on and so on, 
like those who sing of their cups in spite of the steadfast onset 
of sobriety and a headache. These are dead gods they serve. 
By sea or land men want no Powers ascendant, but only law 
and service. That silent unavoidable challenge is in all our 
minds like dawn breaking slowly, shining between the shutters 
of a disordered room. 



The seventeenth century in Europe was the century of Louis 
XIV ; he and French ascendancy and Versailles are the central 
motif of the story. The eighteenth century was equally the 
century of the "rise of Prussia as a great power," and the chief 
figure in the story is Frederick II, Frederick the Great. Inter- 
woven with his history is the story of Poland. 

The condition of affairs in Poland was peculiar. Unlike its 
three neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-IIungarian 
monarchy of the Habsburgs, Poland had not developed a Grand 
Monarchy. Its system of government may be best described as 
republican with a king, an elected life-president. Each king 
was separately elected. It was in fact rather more republican 
than Britain, but its republicanism was more aristocratic in 
form. Poland had little trade and few manufactures; she was 
agricultural and still with great areas of grazing, forest, and 
waste; she was a poor country, and her landowners were poor 
aristocrats. The mass of her population was a downtrodden 
and savagely ignorant peasantry, and she also harboured gToat 
masses of very poor Jews. She had remained Catholic. She 
was, so to speak, a poor Catholic inland Britain, entirely sur- 
rounded by enemies instead of by the sea. She had no definite 
boundaries at all, neither sea nor mountain. And it added to 
her misfortunes that some of her elected kings had been bril- 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 799 

liant and aggressive rulers. Eastward her power extended 
weakly into regions inhabited almost entirely by Kussians; west- 
ward she overlapped a German subject population. 

Because she had no great trade, she had no great towns to 
comj)are with those of western Europe, and no vigorous uni- 
versities to hold her mind together. Her noble class lived on 
their estates, without much intellectual intercourse. They were 
patriotic, they had an aristocratic sense of freedom — which was 
entirely compatible with the systematic impoverishment of their 
serfs — but their patriotism and freedom were incapable of ef- 
fective co-operation. While warfare was a matter of levies of 
men and horses, Poland was a comparatively strong power; 
but it was quite unable to keep pace with the development of 
military art that was making standing forces of professional 
soldiers the necessary weapon in warfare. Yet divided and 
disabled as she was, she could yet count some notable victories 
to her credit. The last Turkish attack upon Vienna (1683) 
was defeated by the Polish cavalry under King John Sobiesky, 
King John III. (This same Sobiesky, before he was elected 
king, had been in the pay of Louis XIV, and had also fought 
for the Swedes against his native country.) !Needless to say, 
this weak aristocratic republic, with its recurrent royal elec- 
tions, invited aggression from all three of its neighbours. "For- 
eign money," and every sort of exterior interference, came into 
the country at each election. And like the Greeks of old, every 
disgruntled Polish patriot flew off to some foreign enemy to 
wreak his indignation upon his ungrateful country. 

Even when the King of Poland was elected, he had very 
little power because of the mutual jealousy of the nobles. Like 
the English peers, they preferred a foreigner, and for much 
the same reason, because he had no roots of power in the land ; 
but, unlike the British, their own government had not the 
solidarity which the periodic assembling of Parliament in Lon- 
don, the "coming up to town," gave the British peers. In Lon- 
don there was "Society," a continuous intermingling of influ- 
ential persons and ideas. Poland had no London and no "So- 
ciety." So practically Poland had no central government at 
all. The King of Poland could not make war nor peace, levy 
a tax nor alter the law, without the consent of the Diet, and 
any single meynher of the Diet had the power of putting a veto 
upon any proposal before it. He had merely to rise and say, 



800 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



"I disapprove," and the matter dropped. He could even carry 
his free veto, his liberum veto, further. He could object to the 
assembly of the Diet, and the Diet was thereby dissolved. Po- 
land was not simply a crowned aristocratic republic like the 
British, it was a paralyzed crowmed aristocratic republic. 



r£c PARTITIONS of POLAKP 




To Frederick the Great the existence of Poland was partic- 
ularly provocative because of the way in which an arm of Po- 
land reached out to the Baltic at Dantzig and separated his an- 
cestral dominions in East Prussia from his territories within 
the empire. It was he who incited Catherine the Second of 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 801 

Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria, whose respect he had 
earned by depriving her of Silesia, to a joint attack upon 
Poland. 

Let four maps of Poland tell the tale. 

After this first outrage of 1772 Poland underwent a great 
change of heart. Poland was indeed born as a nation on the 
eve of her dissolution. There was a hasty but very consider- 
able development of education, literature, and art; historians 
and poets sprang up, and the impossible constitution that had 
made Poland impotent was swept aside. The free veto was 
abolished, the crown was made hereditary to save Poland from 
the foreign intrigues that attended every election, and a Parlia- 
ment in imitation of the British was set up. There were, how- 
ever, lovers of the old order in Poland who resented these 
necessary changes, and these obstructives were naturally sup- 
ported by Prussia and Russia, who wanted no Polish revival. 
Came the second partition, and, after a fierce patriotic struggle 
that began in the region annexed by Prussia and found a leader 
and national hero in Kosciusko, the final obliteration of Poland 
from the map. So for a time ended this Parliamentary threat 
to Grand Monarchy in Eastern Europe. But the patriotism 
of the Poles grew stronger and clearer with suppression. For 
a hundred and twenty years Poland struggled like a submerged 
creature beneath the political and military net that held her 
down. She rose again in 1918, at the end of the Great War. 



We have given some account of the ascendancy of France in 
Europe, the swift decay of the sappy growth of Spanish power 
and its separation from Austria, and the rise of Prussia. So 
far as Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, and Holland were con- 
cerned, their competition for ascendancy in Europe was ex- 
tended and complicated by a struggle for dominion overseas. 

The discovery of the huge continent of America, thinly in- 
habited, undeveloped, and admirably adapted for European 
settlement and exploitation, the simultaneous discovery of great 
areas of unworked country south of the torrid equatorial re^ 
gions of Africa that had hitherto limited European knowledge, 
and the gradual realization of vast island regions in the Eastern. 



802 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

seas, as jet untouclied by Western civilization, was a presenta- 
tion of opportunity to mankind unprecedented in all history. It 
was as if the peoples of Europe had come into some splendid 
legacy. Their world had suddenly quadrupled. There was more 
than enough for all ; they had only to take these lands and con- 
tinue to do well by them, and their crowded poverty would 
vanish like a dream. And they received this glorious legacy 
like ill-bred heirs ; it meant no more to them than a fresh occa- 
sion for atrocious disputes. But what community of human 
beings has ever yet preferred creation to conspiracy ? What 
nation in all our story has ever worked with another when, at 
any cost to itself, it could contrive to do that other an injury ? 
The Powers of Europe began by a frantic ''claiming" of the 
new realms. They went on to exhausting conflicts. Spain, who 
claimed first and most, and who was for a time "mistress" of 
two-thirds of America, made no better use of her possession than 
to bleed herself nearly to death therein. 

We have told how the Papacy in its last assertion of world 
dominion, instead of maintaining the common duty of all Chris- 
tendom to make a great common civilization in the new lands, 
divided the American continent between Spain and Portugal. 
This naturally roused the hostility of the excluded nations. 
The seamen of England showed no respect for either claim, and 
set themselves particularly against the Spanish ; the Swedes 
turned their Protestantism to a similar account. The Hollan- 
ders, so soon as they had shaken off their Spanish masters, 
also set their sails westward to flout the Pope and share in the 
good things of the new world. His Most Catholic Majesty of 
France hesitated as little as any Protestant. All these powers 
were soon busy staking out claims in North America and the 
West Indies. 

Neither the Danish kingdom (which at that time included 
Norway and Iceland) nor the Swedes secured very much in the 
scramble. The Danes annexed some of the West Indian islands. 
Sweden got nothing. Both Denmark and Sweden at this time 
were deep in the affairs of Germany. We have already named 
Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant "Lion of the North," and 
mentioned his campaigns in Germany, Poland, and Russia. 
These Eastern European regions are great absorbents of energy, 
and the strength that might have given Sweden a large share 
ill the new world reaped a barren harvest of glory in Europe. 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 803 

Siicli small settlements as the Swedes made in America pres- 
ently fell to the Dutch. 

The Hollanders, too, with the French monarchy under Car- 
dinal Eichelieu and under Louis XIV eating its way across the 
Spanish Netherlands towards their frontier, had not the un- 
distracted resources that Britain, behind her "silver streak" of 
sea, could put into overseas adventures. 

Moreover, the absolutist efforts of James I and Charles I, 
and the restoration of Charles II, had the effect of driving out 
from England a great number of sturdy-minded, republican- 
spirited Protestants, men of substance and character, who set 
up in America, and particularly in New England, out of reach, 
as they supposed, of the king and his taxes. The Mayflower 
was only one of the pioneer vessels of a stream of emigrants. 
It was the luck of Britain that they remained, though dis- 
sentient in spirit, under the British flag. The Dutch never 
sent out settlers of the same quantity and quality, first because 
their Spanish rulers would not let them, and then because they 
had got possession of their awn country. And though there was 
a great emigration of Protestant Huguenots from the dragon- 
nades and persecution of Louis XIV, they had Holland and 
England close at hand as refuges, and their industry, skill, and 
sobriety went mainly to strengthen those countries, and partic- 
ularly England. A few of them founded settlements in Caro- 
lina, but these did not remain French; 'they fell first to the 
Spanish and finally to the English. 

The Dutch settlements, with the Swedish, also succumbed to 
Britain; Nieuw Amsterdam became British in 1674, and 
its name was changed to New York, as the reader may learn 
very cheerfully in Washington Irving's Knicherhocker s His- 
tory of New York. The state of affairs in North America 
in 1750 is indicated very clearly by a map we have 
adapted from one in Robinson's Medieval and Modern 
Times. The British power was established along the east coast 
from Savannah to the St. Lawrence River, and Newfoundland 
and considerable northern areas, the Hudson Bay Company ter- 
ritories, had been acquired by treaty from the French. The 
British occupied Barbados (almost cur oldest possession) in 
1605, and acquired Jamaica, the Bahamas, and British Hon- 
duras from the Spaniards. But France was pursuing a very 
dangerous and alarming game, a game even more dangerous 



804 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



3tntaitv,Traricc ^ S pauv m Atucrlca., 1750. 

" ^\^^ "X^^^ •^•^•" Shadi^ng docs not uidicate 



areas actually scttLzd (f^^ later 
alextent, cf 




BrudsK 
French. 

sp-^ V7777A 



££2£; 



Ol^ 



and alarming on the map than in reality. She had made real 
settlements in Quebec and Montreal to the north and at New 
Orleans in the south, and her explorers and agents had pushed 
south and north, making treaties with the American Indians 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 805 

of the great plains and setting up claims — without setting up 
towns — right across the continent behind the British. But the 
realities of the case are not adequately represented in this way. 
The British colonies were being very solidly settled by a good 
class of people; they already numbered a population of over a 
million ; the French at that time hardly counted a tenth of that. 
They had a number of brilliant travellers and missionaries at 
work, but no substance of population behind them. 

Many old maps of America in this period are still to be found, 
maps designed to scare and "rouse" the British to a sense of 
the "designs of France" in America. War broke out in 1754, 
and in 1759 the British and Colonial forces under General 
Wolfe took Quebec and completed the conquest of Canada in 
the next year. In 1763 Canada was finally ceded to Britain. 
(But the western part of the rather indefinite region of Louisi- 
ana in the south, named after Louis XIV, remained outside the 
British sphere. It was taken over by Spain; and in 1800 it 
was recovered by France. Finally, in 1803, it was bought from 
France by the United States government.) In this Canadian 
war the American colonists gained a considerable experience 
of the military art, and a knowledge of British military or- 
ffanization that was to be of e:reat use to them a little later. 



§ 9 

It was not only in America that the French and British 
powers clashed. The condition of India at this time was one 
very interesting and attractive to European adventurers. The 
great Mongol Empire of Baber, Akbar, and Aurangzeb was now 
far gone in decay. What had happened to India was very 
parallel to what had happened to Germany. The Great Mo- 
gul at Delhi in India, like the Holy Koman Emperor in Ger- 
many, was still legally overlord, but after the death of Aurang- 
zeb he exerted only a nominal authority except in the immediate 
neighbourhood of his capital. In the south-west a Hindu peo- 
ple, the Mahrattas, had risen against Islam, restored Brahmin- 
ism as the ruling religion, and for a time extended their power 
over the whole southern triangle of India. In Rajputana also 
the rule of Islam was replaced by Brahminism, and at Bhurt- 
pur and Jaipur there ruled powerful Rajput princes. In Oudh 
there was a Shiite kingdom, with its capital at Lucknow, and 



806 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Bengal was also a separate (Moslem) kingdom. Away in the 
Punjab to the north had arisen a very interesting religious body, 
the Sikhs, proclaiming the universal rule of one God and assail- 
ing both the Hindu Vedas and the Moslem Koran. Originally 
a pacific sect, the Sikhs presently followed the example of Islam, 
and sought — at first very disastrously to themselves — to establish 
the kingdom of God by the sword. And into this confused and 
disordered India there presently (1738) came an invader from 
the north, Nadir Shah (1736-47), the Turcoman ruler of 
Persia, who swept down through the Kyber pass, broke every 
army that stood in his way, and captured and sacked Delhi, 
carrying off an enormous booty. He left the north of India 
so utterly broken, that in the next twenty years there were no 
less than six other successful plundering raids into North India 
from Afghanistan, which had become an independent state at the 
death of Nadir Shah. For a time Mahrattas fought with 
Afghans for the rule of North India ; then the Mahratta power 
broke up into a series of principalities, Indore, Gwalior, Baroda, 
and others. . . . 

This was the India into which the French and English were 
thrusting during the eighteenth century. A succession of other 
European powers had been struggling for a commercial and 
political footing in India and the east ever since Vasco da 
Gama had made his memorable voyage round the Cape to 
Calicut. The sea trade of India had previously been in the 
hands of the Eed Sea Arabs, and the Portuguese won it from 
them in a series of sea fights. The Portuguese ships were the 
bigger, and carried a heavier armament. For a time the Por- 
tuguese held the Indian trade as their own, and Lisbon outshone 
Venice as a mart for oriental spices ; the seventeenth century, 
however, saw the Dutch grasping at this monopoly. At the 
crest of their power the Dutch had settlements at the Cape of 
Good Hope, they held Mauritius, they had two establishments in 
Persia, twelve in India, six in Ceylon, and all over the East 
Indies they had dotted their fortified stations. But their self- 
ish resolution to exclude traders of any other European na- 
tionality forced the Swedes, Danes, French, and English into 
hostile competition. The first effectual blows at their overseas 
monopoly were struck in European waters by the victories of 
Blake, the English republican admiral ; and by the opening of 
the eighteenth century both the English and French were in 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 



807 



vigorous competition with the Dutch for trade and privileges 
throughout India. At Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta the Eng- 
lish established their headquarters ; Pondicherry and Chander- 
nagore v^^ere the chief French settlements. 

At first all these European powers came merely as traders, 
and the only establishments they attempted were warehouses; 



The chicPForci^ Seitlcmctttg- izv INDIA' 
at -the end oP tkc IJ^ Ccnhiz-ii^ 




Jurat C^) 

^ J maa ga patam (B ) 
•ionXF) 




Settkmaits 
underluied 

(P)' Partuqaese 
(B)- Dutch 
(B)' British 
(F;= French 
lD^)=Damsh 



but the unsettled state of the country, and the unscrupulous 
methods of their rivals, made it natural for them to fortify 
and arm their settlements, and this armament made them attrac- 
tive allies of the various warring princes who now divided India. 
And it was entirely in the spirit of the new European nationalist 
politics that when the French took one side, the British should 
take another. The gTcat leader upon the English side was 
Robert Clive, who was bom in 1725, and went to India in 1743. 
His chief antagonist was Dupleix. The story of this struggle 



808 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

throughout the first half of the eighteenth century is too long 
and intricate to be told here. By 1761 the British found them- 
selves completely dominant in the Indian peninsula. At Plas- 
sey (1757) and at Buxar (1764) their armies gained striking 
and conclusive victories over the army of Bengal and the army 
of Oudh. The Great ]\Iogiil, nominally their overlord, became 
in effect their puppet. They levied taxes over great areas; 
they exacted indemnities for real or fancied opposition. 

These successes were not gained directly by the forces of 
the King of England ; they were gained by the East India Trad- 
ing Company, which had been originally at the time of its 
incorporation under Queen Elizabeth no more than a company 
of sea adventurers. Step by step they had been forced to raise 
troops and arm their ships. And now this trading company, 
with its tradition of gain, found itself dealing not merely in 
spices and dyes and tea and jewels, but in the revenues and 
territories of princes and the destinies of India. It had come 
to buy and sell, and it found itself achieving a tremendous 
piracy. There was no one to challenge its proceedings. Is it 
any wonder that its captains and commanders and officials, 
nay, even its clerks and common soldiers, came back to England 
loaded with spoils? Men under such circumstances, with a 
great and wealthy land at their mercy, could not determine 
what they might or might not do. It was a strange land to 
them, with a strange sunlight; its brown people were a different 
race, outside their range of sympathy ; its temples and buildings 
seemed to sustain fantastic standards of behaviour. English- 
men at home were perplexed when presently these generals and 
officials came back to make dark accusations against each other 
of extortions and cruelties. Upon Clive Parliament passed a 
vote of censure. He committed suicide in 1774. In 1788 
Warren Hastings, a second great Indian administrator, was 
impeached and acquitted (1792). It was a strange and un- 
precedented situation in the world's history. The English Par- 
liament found itself ruling over a London trading company, 
which in its turn was dominating an empire far greater and 
more populous than all the domains of the British crown. To 
the bulk of the English people India was a remote, fantastic, 
almost inaccessible land, to which adventurous poor young men 
went out, to return after many years very rich and very choleric 
old gentlemen. It was difficult for the English to conceive what 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 809 

the life of these countless brown millions in the eastern sunshine 
could be. Their imaginations declined the task. India re- 
mained romanticall}^' unreal. It was im|xissible for the English, 
therefore, to exert any effective supervision and control over 
the company's proceedings. 

§ 10 

And while the great peninsula of the south of Asia was thus 
falling under the dominion of the English sea traders, an equally 
remarkable reaction of Europe upon Asia was going on in the 
north. We have told in Chap. XXXIII, § 5c, how the Christian 
states of Eussia recovered their independence from the Golden 
Horde, and how the Tsar of Moscow became master of the re- 
public of Novgorod ; and in § 5 of this chapter we have told of 
Peter the Great joining the circle of Grand Monarchs and, as 
it were, dragging Russia into Europe. The rise of this great 
central power of the old world, which is neither altogether of the 
East nor altogether of the West, is one of the utmost importance 
to our human destiny. We have also told in the same chapter 
of the appearance of a Christian steppe people, the Cossacks, 
who fonned a barrier between the feudal agriculture of Poland 
and Hungary to the west and the Tartar to the east. The Cos- 
sacks were the wild east of Europe, and in many ways not un- 
like the wild west of the United States in the middle nineteenth 
century. All who had made Russia too hot to hold them, crim- 
inals as well as the persecuted innocent, rebellious serfs, re- 
ligious sectaries, thieves, vagabonds, murderers, sought asylum 
in the southern steppes, and there made a fresh start and fought 
for life and freedom against Pole, Russian, and Tartar alike. 
Doubtless fugitives from the Tartars to the east also contributed 
to the Cossack mixture. Chief among these new nomad tribes 
were the Ukraine Cossacks on the Dnieper and the Don Cossacks 
on the Don. Slowly these border folk were incorporated in 
the Russian imperial service, much as the Highland clans of 
Scotland were converted into regiments by the British govern- 
ment. New lands were offered them in Asia. They became a 
weapon against the dwindling power of the Mongolian nomads, 
first in Turkestan and then across Siberia as far as the Amur. 

The decay of Mongol energy in the seventeenth and eight- 
eenth centuries is very difficult to explain. Within two or 
three centuries from the days of Jengis and Timurlane, central 



810 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



Asia had relapsed from a period of world ascendancy to ex- 
treme political impotence. Changes of climate, unrecorded 
pestilences, infections of a malarial type, may have played their 
part in this recession — which may be only a temporary recession 
measured by the scale of universal history — of the Central Asian 




peoples. Some authorities think that the spread of Buddhist 
teaching from China also had a pacifying influence upon them. 
At any rate, by the sixteenth century the Mongol Tartar and 
Turkish peoples were no longer pressing outward, but were 
being invaded, subjugated, and pushed back both by Christian 
Russia in the west and by China in the east. 

All through the seventeenth century the Cossacks were spread- 
ing eastward from European Russia, and settling wherever 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 811 

they found agricultural conditions. Cordons of forts and sta- 
tions formed a moving frontier to these settlements to the south, 
where the Turkomans were still strong and active ; to the north- 
east, however, Russia had no frontier until she reached right 
to the Pacific. . . . 

At the same time China was in a phase of expansion. In 
1644 the Ming Dynasty, in a state of artistic decay and greatly 
weakened by a Japanese invasion, fell to Manchu conquerors, 
a people apparently identical with the fonner Kin Dynasty, 
which had ruled at Pekin over North China until the days of 
Jengis. It was the Manchus who imposed the pigtail as a mark 
of political loyalty upon the Chinese population. They brought 
a new energy into Chinese affairs, and their northern interests 
led to a considerable northward expansion of the Chinese civ- 
ilization and influence into Manchuria and Mongolia. So it 
was that by the middle of the eighteenth century the Russians 
and Chinese were in contact in Mongolia. At this period 
China ruled eastern Turkestan, Tibet, Nepal, Burmah, and 
Annam. . . . 

We have mentioned a Japanese invasion of China (or rather 
of Korea). Except for this aggression upon China, Japan plays 
no part in our history before the nineteenth century. Like 
China under the Mings, Japan had set her face resolutely against 
the interference of foreigners in her affairs. She was a country 
loading her own civilized life, magically sealed against intruders. 
We have told little of her hitherto because there was little to 
tell. Her picturesque and romantic history stands apart from 
the general drama of human affairs. Her population was 
chiefly a Mongolian population, with some very interesting 
white people of a Nordic type, the Hairy Ainu, in the northern 
islands. Her civilization seems to have been derived almost 
entirely from Korea and China ; her art is a special development 
of Chinese art, her writing an adaptation of the Chinese script. 

§ 11 

In these preceding ten sections we have been dealing with an 
age of division, of separated nationalities. We have already 
described this period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
as an interregiium in the progress of mankind towards a world- 
wide unity. Throughout this period there was no ruling unify- 



812 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ing idea in men's minds. Tlie impulse of the empire had failed 
until the Emperor was no more than one of a number of com- 
peting princes, and the dream of Christendom also was a fading 
dream. The developing "powers" jostled one another through- 
out the world ; but for a time it seemed that they might jostle 
one another indefinitely without any great catastrophe to man- 
kind. The great geographical discoveries of the sixteenth cen- 
tury had so enlarged human resources that, for all their divi- 
sions, for all the waste of their wars and policies, the people 
of Europe enjoyed a considerable and increasing prosperity. 
Central Europe recovered steadily from the devastation of the 
Thirty Years' War. 

Looking back upon this period, which came to its climax 
in the eighteenth century, looking back, as we can begin to do 
nowadays, and seeing its events in relation to the centuries that 
came before it and to the great movements of the present time, 
we are able to realize how transitory and provisional were its 
political forms and how unstable its securities. Provisional 
it was as no other age has been provisional, an age of assimi- 
lation and recuperation, a political pause, a gathering up of 
the ideas of men and the resources of science for a wider 
human effort. But the contemporary mind did not see 
it in that light. The failure of the great creative ideas as 
they had been formulated in the Middle Ages had left human 
thought for a time destitute of the guidance of creative ideas; 
even educated and imaginative men saw the world undramati- 
cally; no longer as an interplay of effort and destiny, but as the 
scene in which a trite happiness was sought and the milder vir- 
tues were rewarded. It was not simply the contented and con- 
servative-minded who, in a world of rapid changes, were under 
the sway of this assurance of an achieved fixity of human condi- 
tions. Even highly critica? and insurgent intelligences, in de- 
fault of any sustaining movements in the soul of the community, 
betrayed the same disposition. Political life, they felt, had 
ceased to be the urgent and tragic thing it had once been ; it had 
become a polite comedy. The eighteenth was a century of 
comedy — which at the end grew grim. It is inconceivable that 
that world of the middle eighteenth century could have produced 
a Jesus of Nazareth, a Gautama, a Francis of Assisi, an Igna- 
tius of Loyola. If one may imagine an eighteenth-century John 
Huss, it is impossible to imagine anyone with sufficient pas- 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 813 

sion to burn bim. Until tbe stirrings of conscience in Britain 
tbat developed into tbe Metbodist revival began, we can detect 
scarcely a suspicion tbat tbere still remained great tasks in 
band for our race to do, tbat enormous disturbances w^ere close 
at band, or tbat tbe patb of man tbrougb space and time v^as 
dark witb countless dangers, and must to tbe end remain a 
bigb and terrible enterprise. 

We bave quoted again and again in tbis bistory from Gib- 
bon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now we sball 
quote from it for tbe last time and bid it farewell, for we bave 
come to tbe age in wbicb it was written. Gibbon was born in 
1737, and tbe last volume of bis bistory was publisbed in 
1787, but tbe passage we sball quote was probably written in 
tbe year 1780. Gibbon was a young man of delicate bealtb 
and fairly good fortune; be bad a partial and interrupted 
education at Oxford, and tben be completed bis studies in Gen- 
eva ; on tbe wbole bis outlook was Frencb and cosmopolitan 
ratber tban Britisb, and be was mucb under tbe intellectual 
influence of tbat great Frencbman wbo is best known under tbe 
name of Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694- 
1778). Voltaire was an autbor of enormous industiy ; seventy 
volumes of bim adorn tbe present writer's sbelves, and anotber 
edition of Voltaire's works runs to ninety-four; be dealt largely 
witb bistory and public affairs, and be corresponded witb 
Catberine tbe Great of Eussia, Frederick tbe Great of Prus- 
sia, Louis XV, and most of tbe prominent people of tbe time. 
Botb Voltaire and Gibbon bad tbe sense of bistory strong in 
tbem ; botb bave set out very plainly and fully tbeir visions of 
human life; and it is clear tbat to botb of tbem tbe system in 
wbicb tbey lived, tbe system of monarchy, of leisurely and 
privileged gentlefolks, of ratber despised industrial and trading 
people and of downtrodden and negligible labourers and poor 
and common people, seemed the most stably established way of 
living that the world has ever seen. They postured a little as 
republicans, and sneered at the divine pretensions of monarchy ; 
but the republicanism tbat appealed to Voltaire was tbe crowned 
republicanism of the Britain of those days, in which the king 
was simply the official bead, tbe first and greatest of the 
gentlemen. 

Tbe ideal they sustained was the ideal of a polite and polished 
world in which men — men of quality, that is, for no others 



814 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

counted — would be ashamed to be ciTiel or gross or enthusiastic, 
in which the appointments of life would be spacious and ele- 
gant, and the fear of ridicule the potent auxiliary of the law 
in maintaining the decorum and harmonies of life. Voltaire 
had in him the possibility of a passionate hatred of injustice, 
and his interventions on behalf of persecuted or ill-used men 
are the high lights of his long and complicated life-story. And 
this being the mental disposition of Gibbon and Voltaire, and 
of the age in which they lived, it is natural that they should 
find the existence of religion in the world, and in particular 
the existence of Christianity, a perplexing and rather unac- 
countable phenomenon. The whole of that side of life seemed 
to them a kind of craziness in the human make-up. Gibbon's 
great history is essentially an attack upon Christianity as the 
operating cause of the decline and fall. He idealized the crude 
and gross plutocracy of Rome into a world of fine gentlemen 
upon the eighteenth-century model, and told how it fell before 
the Barbarian from without because of the decay through Chris- 
tianity within. In our history here we have tried to set that 
story in a better light. To Voltaire official Christianity was 
"Vinfdme" ; something that limited people's lives, interfered 
with their thoughts, persecuted harmless dissentients. And in- 
deed in that period of the interregnum there was very little 
life or light in either the orthodox Christianity of Rome or in 
the orthodox tame churches of Russia and of the Protestant 
princes. In an interregnum incommoded with an abundance of 
sleek parsons and sly priests it was hard to realize what fires had 
once blazed in the heart of Christianity, and what fires of po- 
litical and religious passion might still blaze in the hearts of 
men. 

At the end of his third volume Gibbon completed his account 
of the breaking up of the Western Empire. He then raised tlie 
question whether civilization might ever undergo again a 
similar collapse. This led him to review the existing state of 
affairs (1780) and to compare it with the state of affairs dur- 
ing the decline of imperial Rome. It will be very convenient 
to our general design to quote some passages from that com- 
parison here, for nothing could better illustrate the state of 
mind of the liberal thinkers of Europe at the crest of the po- 
litical interregnum of the age of the Great Powers, before the 
first intimations of those profound political and social forces 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 815 

of disintegration that have produced at length the dramatic 
interrogations of our own times. 

"This awful revolution," wrote Gibbon of the Western col- 
lapse, ''may be usefully applied to the useful instruction of the 
present age. It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and 
promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native coun- 
try; but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his 
views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose 
various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of po- 
liteness and cultivation. The balance of power will continue 
to fluctuate, and the prosperity of our own or the neighbouring 
kingdoms may be alternately exalted or depressed; but these 
partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of 
happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which 
so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the 
Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe 
are the common enemies of civilized society ; and we may en- 
quire with anxious curiosity whether Europe is still threatened 
with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed 
the arms and institutions of Eome. Perhaps the same reflec- 
tions will illustrate the fall of that mighty empire and ex- 
plain the probable causes of our actual security. 

"The Romans were ignorant of the extent of their danger, 
and the number of their enemies. Beyond the Rhine and 
Danube, the northern countries of Europe and Asia were filled 
with innumerable tribes of hunters and shepherds, poor, vora- 
cious, and turbulent ; bold in arms, and impatient to ravish the 
fruits of industry. The Barbarian world was agitated by the 
rapid impulse oi war; and the peace of Gaul or Italy was 
shaken by the distant revolutions of China. The Huns, who 
fled before a victorious enemy, directed their march towards the 
west; and the torrent was swelled by the gradual accession of 
captives and allies. The flying tribes who yielded to the Huns 
assumed in their turn the spirit of conquest ; the endless column 
of barbarians pressed on the Roman Empire with accumulated 
weight and, if the foremost were destroyed, the vacant space 
was instantly replenished by new assailants. Such formidable 
emigrations can no longer issue from the North ; and the long 
repose, which has been imputed to the decrease of population, 
is the happy consequence of the progress of arts and agricul- 
ture. Instead of some rude villages, thinly scattered among 



81G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

its woods and morasses, Germany now produces a list of two 
thousand three hundred walled towns ; the Christian kingdoms 
of Denmark, Sweden, and Poland have been successively estab- 
lished; and the Hanse merchants, with the Teutonic knights, 
have extended their colonies along the coast of the Baltic, as 
far as the Gulf of Finland. From the Gulf of Finland to the 
Eastern Ocean, Russia now assumes the form of a powerful 
and civilized empire. The plough, the loom, and the forge are 
introduced on the banks of the Volga, the Oby, and the Lena ; 
and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have been taught to trem- 
ble and obey. . . . 

'The Empire of Rome was firmly established by the singular 
and perfect coalition of its members. . . . But this union was 
purchased by the loss of national freedom and military spirit ; 
and the servile provinces, destitute of life and motion, expected 
their safety from the mercenary troops and governors, who were 
directed by the orders of a distant court. The happiness of a 
hundred millions depended on the personal merit of one or two 
men, perhaps children, whose minds were corrupted by educa- 
tion, luxury, and despotic power. Europe is now divided into 
twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable 
commonwealths, and a variety of smaller, though independent, 
states; the chances of royal and ministerial talents are multi- 
plied, at least with the number of its rulers ; and a Julian ^ 
or Semiramis ^ may reign in the north, while Arcadius and 
Honorius ^ again slumber on the thrones of the House of Bour- 
bon. The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual in- 
fluence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and 
stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, 
or, at least, of moderation ; and some sense of honour and jus- 
tice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the 
general manners of the times. In peace, the progress of knowl- 
edge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many 
active rivals : in war, the European forces are exercised by tem- 
perate and undecisive contests. If a savage conqueror should 
issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish 
the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Ger- 
many, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen 

* Frederick the Great of Prussia. 

' Catherine the Great of Russia. 

'Louis XVI of France and Charles III of Spain. 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 817 

of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common 
defence. Sliould the victorious Barbarians carry shivery and 
desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels 
would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized 
society ; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American 
world which is already tilled with her colonies and institutions. 

^'Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the 
strength and courage of Barbarians. In every age they have op- 
pressed the polite and peaceful nations of China, India, and 
Persia, who neglected, and still neglect, to counterbalance these 
natural powers by the resources of military art. The warlike 
states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and Eome, educated 
a race of soldiers ; exercised their bodies, disciplined their cour- 
age, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions, and con- 
verted the iron which they possessed into strong and serviceable 
weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with their 
laws and manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and 
his successors armed and instructed, for the ruin of the em- 
pire, the rude valour of the Barbarian mercenaries. The mili- 
tary art has been changed by the invention of gunpowder ; which 
enables man to command the two most powerful agents of 
nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry, mechanics, archi- 
tecture, have been applied to the ser\'ice of war ; and the ad- 
verse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of 
attack and of defence. Historians may indignantly observe that 
the preparations of a siege would found and maintain a flourish- 
ing colony ; yet we cannot be displeased that the subversion of 
a city should be a work of cost and difficulty, or that an indus- 
trious people should be protected by those artsj which survive 
and supply the decay of military virtue. Cannon and fortifica- 
tions now form an impregnable barrier against the Tartar 
horse ^ ; and Europe is secure from any future irruption of 
Barbarians ; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to 
be barbarous. . . . 

*' Should these speculations be found doubtful or fallacious, 
there still remains a more humble source of comfort and hope. 
The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the do- 
mestic history, or tradition, of the most enlightened nations, 
represent the human savage, naked both in mind and body, and 

' Gibbon forgets here that cannon and the fundamentals of modern 
military method came to Europe with the Mongols. 



818 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language. 
From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal 
state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, 
to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the 
heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his 
mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, 
infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with 
redoubled velocity ; ages of laborious ascent have been followed 
by a moment of rapid downfall ; and the several climates of the 
globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the 
experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and 
diminish our apprehensions ; we cannot determine to what 
height the human species may aspire in their advances towards 
perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no people, un- 
less the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original 
barbarism. 

"Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and 
religious zeal have diffused, among the savages of the Old and 
New World, those inestimable gifts, they have been successively 
propagated ; they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce 
in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has in- 
creased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the 
knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race." 

§ 13 

One of the most interesting aspects of this story of Europe in 
the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century during the phase 
of the Grand and Parliamentary Monarchies, is the compara- 
tive quiescence of the peasants and workers. The insurrection- 
ary fires of the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
seem to have died down. The acute economic clashes of the 
earlier period had been mitigated by rough adjustments. The 
discovery of America had revolutionized and changed the scale 
of business and industry, had broiight a vast volume of pre- 
cious metal for money into Europe, had increased and varied 
employment. For a time life and work ceased to be intolerable 
to the masses of the poor. This did not, of course, prevent 
much individual misery and discontent ; the poor we have al- 
ways had with us, but this misery and discontent was divided 
and scattered. It became inaudible. 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 819 

In the earlier period tlie common people had had an idea to 
crystallize upon, the idea of Christian communism. They had 
found an educated leadership in the dissentient priests and 
doctors of the Wycliffe type. As the movement for a revival 
in Christianity spent its force, as Lutheranism fell back for 
leadership from Jesus upon the Protestant Princes, this con- 
tact and reaction of the fresher minds of the educated class 
upon the illiterate mass was internipted. However numerous 
a downtrodden class may he, and however extreme its miseries, 
it will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves 
solidarity by the development of some common general idea. 
Educated men and men of ideas are more necessary to a popular 
political movement than to any other political process. A mon- 
archy learns by ruling, and an oligarchy of any type has the 
education of affairs ; but the common man, the peasant or toiler, 
has no experience in large matters, and can exist politically 
only through the services, devotion, and guidance of educated 
men. The Reformation, the Reformation that succeeded, the 
Reformation that is of the Princes, by breaking up educational 
facilities, largely destroyed the poor scholar and priest class 
whose persuasion of the crowd had rendered the Refomiation 
possible. 

The Princes of the Protestant countries when they seized 
upon the national churches early apprehended the necessity of 
gripping the universities also. Their idea of education was 
the idea of capturing young clever people for the service of their 
betters. Beyond that they were disposed to regard education 
as a mischievous thing. The only way to an education, therefore, 
for a poor man was through patronage. Of course there was a 
parade of encouragement towards learning in all the Grand 
Monarchies, a setting up of Academies and Royal vSocieties, but 
these benefited only a small class of subservient scholars. The 
church also had learnt to distrust the educated poor man. In 
the gi-eat aristocratic "crowned republic" of Britain there was 
the same shrinkage of educational opportunity. "Both the an- 
cient universities," says Hammond, in his account of the eight- 
eenth century, "were the universities of the rich. There is a 
passage in Macaulay describing the state and pomp of Oxford 
at the end of the seventeenth century, Svhen her Chancellor, the 
Venerable Duke of Oraionde, sat in his embroidered mantle on 
his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian theatre, 



820 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their 
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly pre- 
sented to him as candidates for academical honours.' The uni- 
versity was a power, not in the sense in which that could be 
said of a university like the old university of Paris, whose learn- 
ing could make Popes tremble, but in the sense that the univer- 
sity was part of the recognized machinery of aristocracy. What 
was true of the universities was true of the public schools. 
Education in England was the nursery not of a society, but of 
an order ; not of a state, but of a race of owner-rulers." The mis- 
sionary spirit had departed from education throughout Europe. 
To that quite as much as to the amelioration of things by a dif- 
fused prosperity, this phase of quiescence among the lower 
classes is to be ascribed. They had lost brains and speech, and 
they were fed. The community was like a pithed animal in the 
hands of the governing class. ^ 

Moreover, there had been considerable changes in the propor- 
tions of class to class. One of the most difficult things for the 
historian to trace is the relative amount of the total property 
of the community held at any time by any particular class in 
that community. These things fluctuate very rapidly. The 
peasant wars of Europe indicate a phase of comparatively con- 
centrated property when large masses of people could feel them- 
selves expropriated and at a common disadvantage, and so take 
mass action. This was the time of the rise and prosperity of 
the Fuggers and their like, a time of international finance. 
Then with the vast importation of silver and gold and com- 
modities into Europe from America, there seems to have been 
a restoration of a more diffused state of wealth. The poor 
were just as miserable as ever, but there were perhaps not so 
many poor relatively, and they were broken up into a variety 
of types without any ideas in common. In Great Britain the 
agricultural life which had been dislocated by the confiscations 
of the Reformation had settled down again into a system of 
tenant farming under great landowners. Side by side with 
the large estates there was still, however, much common land 
* "Our present public school system is candidly based on training a 
dominant master class. But the uprising of the workers and modern 
conditions are rapidly making the dominant method unworkable. . . . 
The change in the aim of scliools will transform all the organizations and 
methods of schools, and my belief is that this change will make the new era." 
— F. W. Sanderson, Head Master of Oundle, in an address at Leeds, Feb- 
ruary 16th, 1920. 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 821 

for pasturing the beasts of the poorer villagers, and mudi land 
cultivated in strips upon communal lines. The middling sort 
of man, and even the poorer sort of man upon the land, were 
leading an endurable existence in 1700. The standard of life, 
the idea, that is, of vi'hat is an endurable existence, was, how- 
ever, rising during the opening phase of Grand Monarchy; 
after a time the process of the upward concentration of wealth 
seems to have been resumed, the larger landowners began to 
acquire and crowd out the poorer free cultivators, and the pro- 
portion of poor people and of people who felt they were lead- 
ing impoverished lives increased again. The bigger men were 
unchallenged rulers of Great Britain, and they set themselves 
to enact laws, the Enclosure Acts, that practically confiscated the 
unenclosed and common lands, mainly for the benefit of the 
larger landowners. The smaller men sank to the level of wage 
workers upon the land over which they had once possessed rights 
of cultivation and pasture. 

The peasant in France and upon the Continent generally was 
not so expropriated; his enemy was not the landlord, but the 
taxgatherer ; he was squeezed on his land instead of being 
squeezed off it. 

As the eighteenth century progressed, it is apparent in the 
literature of the time that what to do with "the poor" was again 
exercising men's thoughts. We find such active-minded Eng- 
lish writers as Defoe (1659-1731) and Fielding (1707-54) 
deeply exercised by this problem. But as yet there is no such 
revival of the communistic and equalitarian ideas of primitive 
Christianity as distinguished the time of Wycliffe and John 
Huss. Protestantism in breaking up the universal church had 
for a time broken up the idea of a universal human solidarity. 
Even if the universal church of the Middle Ages had failed al- 
together to realize that idea, it had at any rate been the symbol 
of that idea. 

Defoe and Fielding were men of a livelier practical imagina- 
tion than Gibbon, and they realized something of the economic 
processes that were afoot in their time. So did Oliver Gold- 
smith (1728-74) ; his Deserted Village (1770) is a pamphlet 
on enclosures disguised as a poem. But Gibbon's circumstances 
had never brought economic facts very vividly before his eyes ; 
he saw the world as a struggle between barbarism and civiliza- 
tion, but he perceived nothing of that other struggle over which 



822 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

he floated, the mute, unconscio-us struggle of the commonalty 
against able, powerful, rich, and selfish men. He did not per- 
ceive the accumulation of stresses that were presently to strain 
and break up all the balance of his ''twelve powerful, though 
unequal, kingdoms," his "three respectable commonwealths," 
and their rag, tag, and bobtail of independent minor princes, 
reigning dukes, and so forth. Even the civil war that had begun 
in the British colonies in America did not rouse him to the 
nearness of what we now call ''Democracy." 

From what we have been saying hitherto, the reader may 
suppose that the squeezing of the small fanner and the peasant 
off the land by the great landowners, the mere grabbing of com- 
mons and the concentration of property in the hands of a power- 
ful privileged and greedy class, was all that was happening to 
the English land in the eighteenth century. So we do but state 
the worse side of the change. Concurrently with this change 
of ownership there was going on a great improvement in agri- 
culture. There can be little doubt that the methods of cultiva- 
tion pursued by the peasants, squatters, and small farmers were 
antiquated, wasteful, and comparatively unproductive, and that 
the larger private holdings and estates created by the Enclo- 
sure Acts were much more productive (one authority says 
twenty times more productive) than the old ways. The change 
was perhaps a necessary one and the evil of it was not that it 
was brought about, but that it was brought about so as to in- 
crease both wealth and the numbers of the poor. Its benefits 
were intercepted by the bigger private owners. The community 
was injured to the great profit of this class. 

And here we come upon one of the chief problems of our 
lives at the present time, the problem of the deflection of the 
profits of progress. For two hundred years there has been, 
mainly under the influence of the spirit of science and enquiry, 
a steady improvement in the methods of production of almost 
everything that humanity requires. If our sense of community 
and our social science were equal to the tasks required of them, 
there can be little question that this great increment in pro- 
duction would have benefited the whole community, would have 
given everyone an amount of education, leisure, and freedom 
such as mankind had never dreamt of before. But though the 
common standard of living has risen, the rise has been on a 
scale disproportionately small. The rich have developed a 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 823 

freedom and luxury unknown in the world hitherto, and there 
has been an increase in the proportion of rich people and stag- 
nantly prosperous and unproductive people in the community; 
but that also fails to account for the full benefit. There has been 
much sheer waste. Vast accumulations of material and energy 
have gone into warlike preparations and warfare. Much has 
been devoted to the futile efforts of unsuccessful business com- 
petition. Huge possibilities have remained undeveloped be- 
cause of the opposition of owners, forestallers, and speculators 
to their economical exploitation. The good things that science 
and organization have been bringing within the reach of man- 
kind have not been taken methodically and used to their utmost, 
but they have been scrambled for, snatched at, seized upon by 
gambling adventurers and employed upon selfish and vain ends. 
The eighteenth century in Europe, and more particularly in 
Great Britain and Poland, was the age of private ownership. 
"Private enterprise," which meant in practice that everyone 
was entitled to get everything he could out of the business of 
the community, reigned supreme. No sense of obligation to 
the state in business matters is to be found in the ordinary 
novels, plays, and such-like representative literature of the 
time. Everyone is out "to make his fortune," there is no 
recognition that it is wrong to be an unproductive parasite on 
the community, and still less that a financier or merchant or 
manufacturer can ever be overpaid for his services to mankind. 
This was the moral atmosphere of the time, and those lords 
and gentlemen who grabbed the people's commons, assumed 
possession of the mines under their lands, and crushed down 
the yeoman farmers and peasants to the status of pauper 
labourers, had no idea that they were living anything but highly 
meritorious lives. 

Concurrently with this change in Great Britain from tradi- 
tional patch agriculture and common pasture to large and more 
scientific agriculture, very great changes were going on in the 
manufacture of commodities. In these changes Great Britain 
was, in the eighteenth century, leading the world. Hitherto, 
throughout the whole course of history from the beginnings of 
civilization, manufactures, building, and industries generally 
had been in the hands of craftsmen and small masters who 
worked in their own houses. They had been organized in 
guilds, and were mostly their own employers. They formed 



824. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

an essential and permanent middle class. There were capi- 
talists among them, who let out looms and the like, supplied 
material, and took the finished product, but they were not big 
capitalists. There had been no rich manufacturers. The rich 
men of the world before this time had been great landowners 
or money-lenders and money manipulators or merchants. But 
in the eighteenth century, workers in certain industries began 
to be collected together into factories in order to produce things 
in larger quantities through a systematic division of labour, and 
the employer, as distinguished from the master worker, began 
to be a person of importance. Moreover, mechanical inven- 
tion was producing machines that simplified the manual work 
of production, and were capable of being driven by water 
power and presently by steam. In 1765 Watt's steam en- 
gine was constructed, a very important date in the history of 
industrialism. 

The cotton industry was one of the first to pass into factory 
production (originally with water-driven machinery). The 
woollen industry followed. At the same time iron smelting, 
which had been restrained hitherto to small methods by the 
use of charcoal, resorted to coke made from coal, and the coal 
and iron industries also began to expand. The iron industry 
shifted from the wooded country of Sussex and Surrey to the 
coal districts. By 1800 this change-over of industry from a 
small scale business with small employers to a large scale pro- 
duction under big employers was well in progress. Every- 
where there sprang up factories using first water, then steam 
power. It was a change of fundamental importance in human 
economy. From the dawn of history the manufacturer and 
craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class 
townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his 
skill, and he either became an employer of his fellows, and 
grew towards wealth and equality with the other rich classes, 
or he remained a worker and sank very rapidly to the level of 
a mere labourer. This great change in human affairs is known 
as the Industrial Eevolution. Beginning in Great Britain, it 
spread during the nineteenth century throughout the world. 

As the Industrial Revolution went on, a great gulf opened 
between employer and employed. In the past every manufac- 
turing worker had the hope of becoming an independent mas- 
ter. Even the slave craftsmen of Babylon and Rome were 



PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS 825 

protected bj laws that enabled them to save and buy their 
freedom and to set up for themselves. But now a factory and 
its engines and machines became a vast and costly thing meas- 
ured by the scale of the worker's pocket. Wealthy men had 
to come together to create an enterprise; credit and plant, that 
is to say, ''Capital," were required. ''Setting up for oneself" 
ceased to be a normal hope for an artisan. The worker was 
henceforth a worker from the cradle to the grave. Besides the 
landlords and merchants and the money-dealers who financed 
trading companies and lent their money to the merchants and 
tbe state, there arose now this new wealth of industrial capital 
— a new sort of power in the state. 

Of the working out of these beginnings we shall tell later. 
The immediate effect of the industrial revolution upon the 
countries to which it came, was to cause a vast, distressful shift- 
ing and stirring of the mute, uneducated, leaderless, and now 
more and more propertyless common population. The small 
cultivators and peasants, ruined and dislodged by the Enclosure 
Acts, drifted towards the new manufacturing regions, and there 
they joined the families of the impoverished and degraded 
craftsmen in the factories. Great towns of squalid houses came 
into existence. Nobody seems to have noted clearly what was 
going on at the time. It is the keynote of "private enterprise" 
to mind one's own business, secure the utmost profit, and dis^ 
regard any other consequences. Ugly great factories grew up, 
built as cheaply as possible, to hold as many machines and 
workers as possible. Around them gathered the streets of 
workers' homes, built at the cheapest rate, without space, with- 
out privacy, barely decent, and let at the utmost rent that could 
be exacted. These new industrial centres were at first without 
schools, without churches. . . . 

The English gentleman of the closing decades of the eight- 
eenth century read Gibbon's third volume and congratulated 
himself that there was henceforth no serious fear of the Bar- 
barians, with this new barbarism gTOwing up, with this meta- 
morphosis of his countrymen into something dark and desperate, 
in full progress, within an easy walk perhaps of his door. 



XXXVI 

THE NEW DEMOCEATIC REPUBLICS OF AMERICA 
AND FRANCE 

§ 1. Inconveniences of the Great Power System. § 2. The 
Thirteen Colonies Before Their Revolt. § 3. Civil War Is 
Forced Upon the Colonies. § 4. The War of Independence. 
§ 5. The Constitution of the United States. § 6. Primitive 
Features of the United States Constitution. § 7. Revolu- 
tionary Ideas in France. § 8. The Revolution of the Year 
1789. § 9. The French "C roamed Republic" of '89-91. 
§ 10. The Revolution of the Jacobins. § 11. The Jacobin 
Republic, 1792-9 Jf. § 12. The Directory. § 13. The Pause 
in Reconstruction and the Dawn of Modern Socialism: 



WHEN Gibbon, nearly a century and a half ago, was 
congratnlating the world of refined and educated peo- 
ple that the age of great political and social catas- 
trophes was past, he was neglecting many signs which we — 
in the wisdom of accomplished facts — could have told him 
portended far heavier jolts and dislocations than any he fore- 
saw. We have told how the struggle of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth-century princes for ascendancies and advantages de- 
veloped into a more cunning and complicated struggle of foreign 
offices, masquerading as idealized ''Great Powers," as the eight- 
eenth century wore on. The intricate and pretentious art of 
diplomacy developed. The "Prince" ceased to be a single and 
secretive Machiavellian schemer, and became merely the 
crowned symbol of a Machiavellian scheme. Prussia, Russia, 
and Austria fell upon and divided Poland. France was baffled 
in profound schemes against Spain. Britain circumvented the 
"designs of France" in America and acquired Canada, and 
got the better of France in India. And then a remarkable thing 
occurred, a thing very shocking to European diplomacy. The 
British colonies in America flatly refused to have further part 

S26 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 827 

or lot in this game of ''Great Powers." They objected that they 
had no voice and no great interest in these European schemes 
and conflicts, and they refused to bear any portion of the 
burthen of taxation these foreign policies entailed. ''Taxation 
without representation is tyranny" ; this was their dominant 
idea. 

Of course this decision to separate did not flash out complete 
and finished from the American mind at the beginning of these 
troubles. In America in the eighteenth century, just as in 
England in the seventeenth, there was an entire willingness, 
indeed a desire on the part of ordinary men, to leave foreign 
affairs in the hands of the king and his ministers. But there 
was an equally strong desire on the part of ordinary men to 
be neither taxed nor interfered with in their ordinary pursuits. 
These are incompatible wishes. Common men cannot shirk 
world politics and at the same time enjoy private freedom ; but 
it has taken them countless generations to learn this. The 
first impulse in the American revolt against the government in 
Great Britain was therefore simply a resentment against the 
taxation and interference that followed necessarily from "for- 
eign policy" without any clear recognition of what was in- 
volved in that objection. It was only when the revolt was con- 
summated that the people of the American colonies recognized 
at all clearly that they had repudiated the Great Power view of 
life. The sentence in which that repudiation was expressed 
was Washington's injunction to "avoid entangling alliances." 
For a full century the united colonies of Great Britain in North 
America, liberated and independent as the United States of 
America, stood apart altogether from the blood-stained intrigues 
and conflicts of the European foreign offices. Soon after (1810 
to 1823) they were able to extend their principle of detach- 
ment to the rest of the continent, and to make all the New 
World "out of bounds" for the scheming expansionists of the 
old. When at length, in 1917, they were obliged to re-enter the 
arena of world politics, it was to bring the new spirit and new 
aims their aloofness had enabled them to develop into the tangle 
of international relationships. They were not, however, the 
first to stand aloof. Since the treaty of Westphalia (1648), 
the confederated states of Switzerland, in their mountain fast- 
nesses, had sustained their right to exclusion from the schemes 
of kings and empires. 



828 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

But. since the North American peoples are now to play an 
increasingly important part in our history, it will be well to 
devote a little more attention than we have hitherto given to 
their development. We have already glanced at this story in 
§ 8 of the preceding chapter. We will now tell a little more 
fully — though still in the barest outline — what these colonies 
were, whose recalcitrance was so disconcerting to the king and 
ministers of Great Britain in their diplomatic game against 
the rest of mankind. 



The extent of the British colonies in America in the early 
half of the eighteenth century is shown in the accompanying 
map. The darker shading represents the districts settled in 
1700, the lighter the growth of the settlements up to 1760. It 
will be seen that the colonies were a mere fringe of population 
along the coast, spreading gradually inland and finding in the 
Alleghany and Blue Mountains a very serious barrier. Among 
the oldest of these settlements was the colony of Virginia, the 
name of which commemorates Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin 
Queen of England. The first expedition to found a colony in 
Virginia was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, but there 
was no permanent settlement at that time; and the real begin- 
nings of Virginia date from the foundation of the Virginia 
Company in 1606 in the reign of James I (1603-25). The 
story of John Smith and the early founders of Virginia and 
of how the Indian "princess" Pocahontas married one of his 
gentlemen, is an English classic.^ In growing tobacco the Vir- 
ginians found the beginning of prosperity. At the same time 
that the Virginian Company was founded, the Plymouth Com- 
pany obtained a charter for the settlement of the country to 
the north of Long Island Sound, to which the English laid 
claim. But it was only in 1620 that the northern region began 
to be settled, and that under fresh charters. The settlers of 
the northern region (New England), which became Connecti- 
cut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, were 
men of a difi"erent stamp to the Virginia people. They were 
Protestants discontented with the Anglican Church compromise, 
and republican-spirited men hopeless of resistance to the Grand 

^John Smith's Travels. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 829 

Monarchy of James I and Charles I. Their pioneer ship was 
the Mayflower, which founded New Plymouth in 1620. The 
dominant northern colony was Massachusetts. Differences in 
religious method and in ideas of toleration led to the separation 
of the three other Puritan colonies from Massachusetts. It 
illustrates the scale upon which things were done in those days 
that the whole state of New Hampshire was claimed as belong- 
ing to a certain Captain John Mason, and that he offered to 
sell it to the king (King Charles II in 1671) in exchange for 
the right to import 300 tons of French wine free of duty — an 
offer which was refused. The present state of Maine was bought 
by Massachusetts from its alleged owner for twelve hundred 
and fifty pounds. 

In the Civil War that ended with the decapitation of Charles 
I the sympathies of New England were for the Parliament, 
and Virginia was Cavalier; but two hundred and fifty miles 
separated these settlements, and there were no serious hostili- 
ties. With the return of the monarchy in 1660, there was a 
vigorous development of British colonization in America. 
Charles II and his associates were greedy for gain, and the 
British crown had no wish to make any further experiments 
in illegal taxation at home. But the undefined relations of 
the colonies to the crown and the British government seemed to 
afford promise of financial adventure across the Atlantic. There 
was a rapid development of plantations and proprietary colonies. 
Lord Baltimore had already in 1632 set up a colony that was 
to be a home of religious freedom for Catholics under the at- 
tractive name of Maryland, to the north and east of Virginia ; 
and now the Quaker Penn (whose father had rendered valuable 
services to Charles II) established himself to the north at 
Philadelphia and founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Its 
main boundary with Maryland and Virginia was delimited 
by two men, Mason and Dixon, whose "Mason and Dixon's 
Line" was destined to become a very important line indeed in 
the later affairs of the United States. Carolina, which was 
originally an unsuccessful French Protestant establishment, and 
which owed its name not to Charles (Carolus) II of England, 
but to Charles IX of France, had fallen into English hands and 
was settled at several points. Between Maryland and New 
England stretched a number of small Dutch and Swedish set- 
tlements, of which the chief town was New Amsterdam. These 



830 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



settlements were captured from the Dutch by the British in 
1664, lost again in 1673, and restored by treaty when Hol- 
land and England made peace in 1674. Thereby the whole 



sctdcd viptol7^0 V ~ 




coast from Maine to Carolina became in some, form or other a 
British possession. To the south the Spanish were established ; 
their headquarters were at Fort St. Augustine in Florida, and 
in 1732 the town of Savannah was settled by a philanthropist 
Oglethorpe from England, who had taken pity on the miserable 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 831 

people imprisoned for debt in England, and rescued a number 
of them from prison to become the founders of a new colony, 
Georgia, which was to be a bulwark against the Spanish. So 
by the middle of the eighteenth century we have these settle- 
ments along the American coast-line: the New England group 
of Puritans and free Protestants, Maine (belonging to Massa- 
chusetts), New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and 
Massachusetts ; the captured Dutch group, which was now di- 
vided up into New York (New Amsterdam rechristened), New 
Jersey, and Delaware (Swedish before it was Dutch, and in its 
earliest British phase attached to Pennsylvania) ; then came 
Catholic Maryland ; Cavalier Virginia ; Carolina (which was 
presently divided into North and South) and Oglethorpe's 
Georgia. Later on a number of Tyrolese Protestants took 
refuge in Georgia, and there was a considerable immigration of 
a good class of German cultivators into Pennsylvania. 

Such were the miscellaneous origins of the citizens of the 
Thirteen Colonies. The possibility of their ever becoming 
closely united would have struck an impartial observer in 1760 
as being very slight. Superadded to the initial differences of 
origin, fresh differences were created by climate. North of the 
Mason and Dixon line farming was practised mainly upon 
British or Central European lines by free white cultivators. 
The settled country of New England took on a likeness to the 
English countryside ; considerable areas of Pennsylvania de- 
veloped fields and farmhouses like those of South Germany. 
The distinctive conditions in the north had, socially, important 
effects. Masters and men had to labour together as backwoods- 
men, and were equalized in the process. They did not start 
equally; many "servants" are mentioned in the roster of the 
Mayflower. But they rapidly became equal under colonial con- 
ditions ; there was, for instance, a vast tract of land to be had 
for the taking, and the "servant" went off and took land like 
his master. The English class system disappeared. Under 
colonial conditions there arose equality "in the faculties both 
of body and mind," and an individual independence of judg- 
ment impatient of interference from England. But south of 
the Mason and Dixon line tobacco growing began, and the 
warmer climate encouraged the establishment of plantations 
with gang labour. Bed Indian captives were tried, but found 
to be too homicidal ; Cromwell sent Irish prisoners of war to 



832 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Virginia, which did much to reconcile the Royalist planters to 
republicanism ; convicts were sent out, and there was a consid- 
erable trade in kidnapped children, who were '^spirited away" 
to America to become apprentices or bond slaves. But the most 
convenient form of gang labour proved to be that of negro 
slaves. The first negro slaves were brought to Jamestown in 
Virginia by a Dutch ship as early as 1620. By 1700 negro 
slaves were scattered all over the states, but Virginia, Mary- 
land, and the Carolinas were their chief regions of employ- 
ment, and while the communities to the north were communities 
of not very rich and not very poor farming men, the south 
developed a type of large proprietor and a white community of 
overseers and professional men subsisting on slave labour. 
Slave labour was a necessity to the social and economic system 
that had grown up in the south; in the north the presence of 
slaves was unnecessary and in some respects inconvenient. Con- 
scientious scruples about slavery were more free, therefore, to 
develop and flourish in the northern atmosphere. To this 
question of the revival of slavery in the world we must return 
when we come to consider the perplexities of American Democ- 
racy. Here we note it simply as an added factor in the hetero- 
geneous mixture of the British Colonies. 

But if the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies were miscel- 
laneous in their origins and various in their habits and sym- 
pathies, they had three very strong antagonisms in common. 
They had a common interest against the Red Indians. For a 
time they shared a common dread of French conquest and 
dominion. And thirdly, they were all in conflict with the claims 
of the British crown and the commercial selfishness of the nar- 
row oligarchy who dominated the British Parliament and 
British affairs. 

So far as the first danger went, the Indians were a constant 
evil, but never more than a threat of disaster. They remained 
divided against themselves. Yet they had shown possibilities 
of combination upon a larger scale. The Five Nations of the 
Iroquois (see map, p. 830) was a very important league of 
tribes. But it never succeeded in playing off the French against 
the English to secure itself, and no Red Indian Jengis Khan 
ever arose among these nomads of the new world. The French 
aggression was a more serious threat. The French never made 
settlements in America on a scale to compete with the English, 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 833 

but their government set about the encirclement of the colonies 
and their subjugation in a terrifyingly systematic manner. The 
English in America were colonists; the French were explorers, 
adventurers, agents, missionaries, merchants, and soldiers. 
Only in Canada did they strike root. French statesmen sat 
over maps and dreamt dreams, and their dreams are to be seen 
in our map in the chain of forts creeping southward from the 
great lakes and northward up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. 
The struggle of France and Britain was a world-wide struggle. 
It was decided in India, in Germany, and on the high seas. In 
the Peace of Paris (1763) the French gave England Canada, 
and relinquished Louisiana to the inert hands of declining 
Spain. It was the complete abandonment of America by France. 
The lifting of the French danger left the colonists unencum- 
bered to face their third common antagonist — the crown and 
government of their mother land. 



We have noted in the previous chapter how the governing 
class of Great Britain steadily acquired the land and destroyed 
the liberty of the common people throughout the eighteenth 
century, and how greedily and blindly the new industrial revolu- 
tion was brought about. We have noted also how the British 
Parliament, through the decay of the representative methods 
of the House of Commons, had become both in its upper and 
lower houses merely the instrument of government through the 
big landowners. Both these big property-holders and the crown 
were deeply interested in America ; the former as private ad- 
venturers, the latter partly as representing the speculative ex- 
ploitations of the Stuart kings, and partly as representing the 
state in search of funds for the expenses of foreign policy, and 
neither lords nor crown were disposed to regard the traders, 
planters, and common people of the colonies with any more con- 
sideration than they did the yeomen and small cultivators at 
home. At bottom the interests of the common man in Great 
Britain, Ireland, and America were the same. Each was being 
squeezed by the same system. But while in Britain oppressor 
and oppressed were closely tangled up in one intimate social 
system, in America the crown and the exploiter were far away, 



834 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and men could get together and develop a sense of community 
against their common enemy. 

Moreover, the American colonist had the important advan- 
tage of possessing a separate and legal organ of resistance to 
the British government in the assembly or legislature of his 
colony that was necessary for the management of local affairs. 
The common man in Britain, cheated out of his proper reprer 
sentation in the Commons, had no organ, no centre of expression 
and action for his discontents. 

It will be evident to the reader, bearing in mind the variety 
of the colonies, that here was the possibility of an endless series 
of disputes, aggressions, and counter-aggressions. The story 
of the development of irritations between the colonies and 
Britain is a story far too intricate, subtle, and lengthy for the 
scheme of this Outlina Suffice it that the grievances fell under 
three main heads : attempts to secure for British adventurers or 
the British government the profits of the exploitation of new 
lands; systematic restrictions upon trade designed to keep the 
foreign trade of the colonies entirely in British hands, so that 
the colonial exports all went through Britain and only British- 
made goods were used in America ; and finally attempts at taxa- 
tion through the British Parliament as the supreme taxing 
authority of the empire. Under the pressure of this triple 
system of annoyances, the American colonists were forced to 
do a very considerable amount of hard political thinking. Such 
men as Patrick Henry and James Otis began to discuss the 
fundamental ideas of government and political association very 
much as they had been discussed in England in the great days 
of Cromwell's Commonweal. They began to deny both the 
divine origin of kingship and the supremacy of the British 
Parliament, and (James Otis, 1762) to say such things as: — 

"God made all men naturally equal. 

"Ideas of earthly superiority are educational, not innate. 

"Kings were made for the good of the people, and not the 
people for them. 

"I^o government has a right to make slaves of its subjects. 

"Though most governments are de facto arbitrary, and conse- 
quently the curse and scandal of human nature, yet none are 
de jure arbitrary." 

Some of which propositions reach far. 

This ferment in the political ideas of the Americans was 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 8S5 

started by. English leaven. One very influential English writer 
was John Locke (1632-1704), whose Two Treatises on Civil 
Governmerit may be taken, as much as any one single book can 
be taken in such cases, as the point of departure for modern 
demoeratic ideas. He was the son of a Cromwellian soldier, 
he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, during the repub- 
lican ascendancy, he spent some years in Holland in exile, and 
his writings form a bridge between the bold political thinking 
of those earlier republican days and the revolutionary move- 
ment both in America and France. 

But men do not begin to act upon theories. It is always 
some real danger, some practical necessity, that produces action ; 
and it is only after action has destroyed old relationships and 
produced a new and perplexing state of affairs that theory comes 
to its own. Then it is that theory is put to the test. The dis- 
cord in interests and ideas between the colonists was brought 
to a fighting issue by the obstinate resolve of the British Parlia- 
ment after the peace of 1763 to impose taxation upon the Ameri- 
can colonies. Britain was at peace and flushed with successes ; 
it seemed an admirable opportunity for settling accounts with 
these recalcitrant settlers. But the great British property- 
owners found a power beside their own, of much the same mind 
with them, but a little divergent in its ends — the reviving 
crown. King George III, who had begun his reign in 1760, 
was resolved to be much more of a king than his two German 
predecessors. He could speak English ; he claimed to "glory 
in the name of Briton" — and indeed it is not a bad name for a 
man without a perceptible drop of English, Welsh, or Scotch 
blood in his veins. In the American colonies and the overseas 
possessions generally, with their indefinite charters or no char- 
ters at all, it seemed to him that the crown might claim authority 
and obtain resources and powers absolutely denied to it by the 
strong and jealous aristocracy in Britain. This inclined many 
of the Whig noblemen to a sympathy with the colonists that 
they might not otherwise have shown. They had no objection 
to the exploitation of the colonies in the interests of British 
"private enterprise," but they had very strong objections to 
the strengthening of the crown by that exploitation so as to 
make it presently independent of themselves. 

The war that broke out was therefore in reality not a war 
between Britain and the colonists, it was a war between 



836 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the British government and the colonists, with a body of 
Whig noblemen and a considerable amount of public feeling 
in England on the side of the latter. An early move after 1763 
was an attempt to raise revenue for Britain in the colonies by 
requiring that newspapers and documents of various sorts 
should be stamped. This was stiffly resisted^ the British crown 
was intimidated, and the Stamp Acts were repealed (1766). 
Their repeal was gi-eeted by riotous rejoicings in London, more 
hearty even than those in the colonies. 

But the Stamp Act aifair was only one eddy in a turbulent 
stream flowing towards civil war. Upon a score of pretexts, 
and up and down the coast, the representatives of the British 
government were busy asserting their authority and making 
British government intolerable. The quartering of soldiers 
upon the colonists was a great nuisance. Rhode Island was 
particularly active in defying the trade restrictions; the Rhode 
Islanders were "free traders," — that is to say, smugglers; a 
government schooner, the Gaspee, ran aground off Providence ; 
she was surprised, boarded, and captured by armed men in 
boats, and burnt. In 1773, with a total disregard of the exist- 
ing colonial tea trade, special advantages for the importation 
of tea into America were given by the British Parliament to 
the East India Company. It was resolved by the colonists to 
refuse and boycott this tea. When the tea importers at Boston 
showed themselves resolute to land their cargoes, a band of 
men disguised as Indians, in the presence of a great crowd of 
people, boarded the three tea ships and threw the tea overboard 
(December 16th, 1773). 

All 1774 was occupied in the gathering up of resources on 
either side for the coming conflict. It was decided by the Brit- 
ish Parliament in the spring of 1774 to punish Boston by clos- 
ing her port. Her trade was to be destroyed unless she accepted 
that tea. It was a quite typical instance of that silly "firmness" 
which shatters empires. In order to enforce this measure, Brit- 
ish troops were concentrated at Boston under General Gage. 
The colonists took counter-measures. The first colonial Con- 
gress met at Philadelphia in September, at which twelve colonies 
were represented : Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hamp- 
shire, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 
Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North and South Carolina. 
Georgia was not present. True to the best English traditions, 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 



837 



the Congress documented its attitude by a "Declaration of 
Rights." Practically this CongTess was an insurrectionary 
government, but no blow was struck until the spring of 1775. 
Then came the first shedding of blood. 

Two of the American leaders, Hancock and Samuel Adams, 
had been marked down by the British Government for arrest 
and trial for treason ; they were known to be at Lexington, about 




eleven miles from Boston ; and in the night of April 18th, 1775, 
Gage set his forces in motion for their arrest. 

That night was a momentous one in history. The movement 
.of Gage's troops had been observed, signal lanterns were shown 
from a church tower in Boston, and two men, Dawes and Paul 
Revere, stole away in boats across the Back Bay to take horse 
and warn the countryside. The British were also ferried over 
the water, and as they marched through the night towards 
Lexington, the firing of signal cannon and the ringing of church 
bells went before them. As they entered Lexington at dawn, 
they saw a little company of men drawn up in military fashion. 
It seems that the British fired first. There was a single shot and 
then a volley, and the little handful decamped, apparently with- 
out any answering shots, leaving eight dead and nine wounded 
upon the village green. 

The British then marched on to Concord, ten miles further, 
occupied the village, and stationed a party on the bridge at that 
place. The expedition had failed in its purpose of arresting 
Hancock and Adams, and the British commander seems to have 



838 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

been at a loss what to do next. Meanwhile the colonial levies 
were coming up from all directions, and presently the picket 
upon the bridge found itself subjected to an increasing fire 
from a gathering number of assailants firing from behind trees 
and fences. A retreat to Boston was decided upon. It was a 
disastrous retreat. The country had risen behind the British ; 
all the morning the colonials had been gathering. Both sides 
of the road were now swarming wath sharpshooters firing from 
behind rock and fence and building; the soldiers were in con- 
spicuous scarlet uniforms, with yellow facings and white gaiters 
and cravats ; this must have stood out very vividly against the 
cold sharp colours of the late New England spring; the day 
was bright, hot, and dusty, and they were already exhausted by 
a night march. Eveiy few yards a man fell, wounded or killed. 
The rest tramped on, or halted to fire an ineffectual volley. No 
counter-attack was possible. Their assailants lurked every- 
where. At Lexington there were British reinforcements and 
two guns, and after a brief rest the retreat was resumed in 
better order. But the sharpshooting and pursuit was pressed 
to the river, and after the British had crossed back into ]3oston, 
the colonial levies took up their quarters in Cambridge and 
prepared to blockade the city. 

§ 4 

So the war began. It was not a war that promised a con- 
clusive end. The colonists had no one vulnerable capital ; they 
were dispersed over a great country, with a limitless wilderness 
behind it, and so they had great powers of resistance. They 
had learnt their tactics largely from the Indians; they could 
fight well in open order, and harry and destroy troops in move- 
ment. But they had no disciplined army that could meet the 
British in a pitched battle, and little military equipment ; and 
their levies grew impatient at a long campaign, and tended to 
go home to their farms. The British, on the other hand, had 
a well-drilled army, and their command of the sea gave them 
the power of shifting their attack up and down the long Atlantic 
seaboard. They were at peace with all the world. But the 
king was stupid and greedy to interfere in the conduct of 
affairs; the generals he favoured were stupid "strong men" or 
flighty men of birth and fashion; and the heart of England 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 839 

was not in the business. He trusted rather to being able to 
blockade, raid, and annoy the colonists into submission than 
to a conclusive conquest and occupation of the land. But the 
methods employed, and particularly the use of hired German 
troops, who still retained the cruel traditions of the Thirty 
Years' War, and of Indian auxiliaries, who harried the out- 
lying settlers, did not so much weary the Americans of the war 
as of the British. The Congress, meeting for the second time 
in 1775, endorsed the actions of the New England colonists, 
and appointed George Washington the American commander- 
in-chief. In 1777, General Burgoyne, in an attempt to get 
down to ISTew York from Canada, was defeated at Freeman's 
Farm on the Upper Hudson, and surrounded and obliged to 
capitulate at Saratoga with his whole army. This disaster en- 
couraged the French and Spanish to come into the struggle 
on the side of the colonists. The French sent General Lafayette 
to the States to assist them with his advice, and their fleet did 
much to minimize the advantage of the British at sea. General 
Cornwallis was caught in the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia 
in 1781, and capitulated with his army. The British Govern- 
ment, now heavily engaged with France and Spain in Europe, 
was at the end of its resources. 

At the outset of the war the colonists in general seem to have 
been as little disposed to repudiate monarchy and claim com- 
plete independence as were the Hollanders in the opening phase 
of Philip II's persecutions and follies. The separatists were 
called radicals ; they were mostly extremely democratic, as we 
should say in England to-day, and their advanced views fright- 
ened many of the steadier and wealthier colonists, for whom 
class privileges and distinctions had considerable charm. But 
early in 177G an able and persuasive Englishman, Thomas 
Paine, published a pamphlet at Philadelphia with the title of 
Common Sense, which had an enormous effect on public opinion. 
Its style was rhetorical by modem standards. "The blood of 
the slain, the weeping voice of Xature cries, ' 'Tis time to part,' " 
and so forth. But its effects were very great. It converted 
thousands to the necessity of separation. The turn-over of 
opinion, once it had begun, was rapid. 

Only in the summer of 1776 did Congress take the irrevocable 
step of declaring for separation. "The Declaration of Indepen- 
dence," another of those exemplary documents which it has been 



840 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tlie peculiar service of the English to produce for mankind, was 
drawn up by Thomas Jelierson ; and after various amendments 
and modifications it was made the fundamental document of 
the United States of America. There were two noteworthy 
amendments to Jefferson's draft. He had denounced the 
slave trade fiercely, and blamed the home government for in- 
terfering with colonial attempts to end it. This was thrown 
out, and so, too, was a sentence about the British: 'Sve must 
endeavour to forget our former love for them ... we might 
have been a free and a great people together." 

Towards the end of 1782, the preliminary articles of the 
treaty in which Britain recognized the complete independence 
of the United States were signed at Paris. The end of the war 
was proclaimed on April 19th, 1783, exactly eight years after 
Paul Revere's ride, and the retreat of Gage's men from Con- 
cord to Boston. The Treaty of Peace was finally signed at 
Paris in September. 



§ 5 

From the point of view of human history, the way in which 
the Thirteen States became independent is of far less impor- 
tance than the fact that they did become independent. And 
with the establishment of their independence came a new sort 
of community into the world. It was like something coming 
out of an egg. It was a western European civilization that 
had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christen- 
dom ; it had not a vestige of monarchy left and no state religion. 
It had no dukes, princes, counts, nor any sort of title-bearers 
claiming to ascendancy or respect as a right. Even its unity 
was as yet a mere unity for defence and freedom. It was in 
these respects such a clean start in political organization as the 
world had not seen before. The absence of any binding re- 
ligious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of forms 
of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but as a 
state document of 1796 explicitly declared, ^'The government 
of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Chris- 
tian religion." ^ The new community had in fact gone right 
down to the bare and stripped fundamentals of human associa- 
* The Tripoli Treaty, see Channing, vol, iii, chap, xviii. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 



841 



tion, and it was building up a new sort of society and a new 
sort of state upon those foundations. 

Here were about four million people scattered over vast areas 
with very slow and difficult means of intercommunication, poor 



yj^ UNITED 5 TATH5, shewin g extent cfscttU- 

tncntiit 1790'^ 



,1. SUPERIOR,. 




K.H.'NewHampshihj 

C. -Connecticut 

'B-.I. 'Rhode Island 

TI.T. NewJeiwey 

IvI? Marylakd 

p. Delaware 



as yet, but with the potentiality of limitless wealth, setting out 
to do in reality on a huge scale such a feat of construction as 
the Athenian philosophers twenty-two centuries before had done 
in imagination and theory. 



842 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

This situation marks a definite stage in tlie release of man 
from precedent and usage, and a definite step forward towards 
the conscious and deliberate reconstruction of his circumstances 
to suit his needs and aims. It was a new method becoming 
practical in human aftairs. The modern states of Europe have 
been evolved institution by institution slowly and planlessly 
out of preceding things. The United States were planned and 
made. 

In one respect, however, the creative freedom of the new 
nation was very seriously restricted. This new sort of com- 
munity and state was not built upon a cleared site. It was not 
even so frankly an artificiality as some of the later Athenian 
colonies, which went out from the mother city to plan and build 
brand new city states with brand new constitutions. The thir- 
teen colonies by the end of the war had all of them constitutions 
either like that of Connecticut and Rhode Island dating from 
their original charters (16G2) or, as in the case of the rest of 
the states, where a British governor had played a large part 
in the administration, re-made during the conflict. But we may 
well consider these reconstructions as contributory essays and 
experiments in the general constructive effort. 

Upon the effort certain ideas stood out very prominently. 
One is the idea of political and social equality. This idea, 
which we saw coming into the world as an extreme and almost 
incredible idea in the age between Buddha and Jesus of Naza- 
reth, is now asserted in the later eighteenth century as a prac- 
tical standard of human relationship. Says the fundamental 
statement of Virginia : "All men are by nature equally free 
and independent," and it proceeds to rehearse their "rights," 
and to assert that all magistrates and governors are but "trustees 
and servants" of the commonweal. All men are equally entitled 
to the free exercise of religion. The king by right, the aris- 
tocrat, the "natural slave," the god king, and the god have all 
vanished from this political scheme — so far as these declarations 
go. Most of the states produced similar preludes to government. 
The Declaration of Independence said that "all men are born 
equal." It is everywhere asserted in eighteenth-century terms 
that the new community is to be — to use the phraseology we 
have introduced in an earlier chapter — a community of will 
and not a community of obedience. But the thinkers of that 
time had a rather clumsier way of putting the thing, they 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 843 

imagined a sort of individual choice of and assent to citizenship 
that never in fact occnrred — the so-called Social Contract. The 
Massachusetts preamble, for instance, asserts that the state is a 
voluntary association, "by which the whole people covenants 
wuth each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that 
all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good." 

Now it will be evident that most of these fundamental state- 
ments are very questionable statements. Men are not born 
equal, they are not born free; they are born a most various 
multitude enmeshed in an ancient and complex social net. Nor 
is any man invited to sign the social contract or, failing that, 
to depart into solitude. These statements, literally interpreted, 
are so manifestly false that it is impossible to believe that the 
men who made them intended them to be literally interpreted. 
They made them in order to express certain elusive but pro- 
foundly important ideas — ideas that after another century and 
a half of thinking the world is in a better position to express. 
Civilization, as this outline has shown, arose as a community 
of obedience, and was essentially a community of obedience. 
But generation after generation the spirit was abused by priests 
and rulers. There was a continual influx of masterful will 
from the forests, parklands, and steppes. The human spirit 
had at last rebelled altogether against the blind obediences of 
the common life ; it was seeking — and at first it was seeking 
very clumsily — to achieve a new and better sort of civilization 
that should also be a community of will. To that end it was 
necessary that every man should be treated as the sovereign of 
himself; his standing was to be one of fellowship and not of 
servility. His real use, his real importance depended upon 
his individual quality. 

The method by which these creators of political America 
sought to secure this community of will was an extremely simple 
and crude one. They gave what was for the time, and in view 
of American conditions, a very wide franchise. Conditions 
varied in the different states; the widest franchise was in 
Pennsylvania, where every adult male taxpayer voted, but, com- 
pared with Britain, all the United States were well within sight 
of manhood suffrage by the end of the eighteenth century. 
These makers of America also made efforts, considerable for 
their times, but puny by more modern standards, to secure a 
widely diffused common education. The information of the 



844 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

citizens as to wliat was going on at home and abroad, tliey left, 
apparently without any qualms of misgiving, to public meetings 
and the privately owned printing press. 

The story of the various state constitutions, and of the con- 
stitution of the United States as a whole, is a very intricate 
one, and we can only deal with it here in the broadest way. 
The most noteworthy point in a modern view is the disregard 
of women as citizens. The American community was a simple, 
largely agricultural community, and most women were married ; 
it seemed natural that they should be represented by their men 
folk. But N^ew Jersey admitted a few women to vote on a 
property qualification. Another point of great interest is the 
almost universal decision to have two governing assemblies, 
confirming or checking each other, on the model of the Lords 
and Commons of Britain. Only Pennsylvania had a single 
representative chamber, and that was felt to be a very danger- 
ous and ultra-democratic state of affairs. Apart from the argu- 
ment that legislation should be slow as well as sure, it is diffi- 
cult to establish any necessity for this ''bi-cameral" arrange- 
ment. It seems to have been a fashion with constitution plan- 
ners in the eighteenth century rather than a reasonable impera- 
tive. The British division was an old one; the Lords, the 
original parliament, was an assembly of "notables," the leading 
men of the kingdom ; the House of Commons came in as a new 
factor, as the elected spokesmen of the burghers and the small 
landed men. It was a little too hastily assumed in the eight- 
eenth century that the commonalty would be given to wild 
impulses and would need checking; opinion was for democracy, 
but for democracy with powerful brakes always on, whether 
it was going up hill or down. About all the upper houses there 
was therefore a flavour of selectness; they were elected on a 
more limited franchise. This idea of making an upper cham- 
ber which shall be a stronghold for the substantial man does 
not appeal to modern thinkers so strongly as it did to the men 
of the eighteenth century, but the bi-cameral idea in another 
form still has its advocates. They suggest that a community 
may with advantage consider its affairs from two points of 
view — through the eyes of a body elected to represent trades, 
industries, professions, public services, and the like, a body 
representing function, and through the eyes of a second body 
elected by localities to represent communities. For the mem- 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 



845 




846 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

bers of the former a man would vote by his calling, for the 
latter by his district of residence. They point out that the 
British House of Lords is in effect a body representing func- 
tion, in which the land, the law, and the church are no doubt 
disproportionately represented, but in which industrialism, 
finance, the great public services, art, science, and medicine, 
also find places ; and that the British House of Commons is 
purely geographical in its reference. It has even been sug- 
gested in Britain that there should be "labour peers," selected 
from among the leaders of the great industrial trade unions. 
But these are speculations beyond our present scope. 

The Central Government of the United States was at first a 
very feeble body, a Congress of representatives of the thirteen 
governments, held together by certain Articles of Confederation. 
This Congress was little more than a conference of sovereign 
representatives ; it had no control, for instance, over the foreign 
trade of each state, it could not coin money nor levy taxes by 
its own authority. When John Adams, the first minister from 
the United States to England, went to discuss a commercial 
treaty with the British foreign secretary, he was met by a 
request for thirteen representatives, one from each of the states 
concerned. He had to confess his inadequacy to make bindina- 
arrangements. The British presently began dealing with each 
state separately over the head of Congress, and they retained 
possession of a number of posts in the American territory about 
the great lakes because of the inability of Congress to hold these 
regions effectually. In another urgent matter Congress proved 
equally feeble. To the west of the thirteen states stretched 
limitless lands into Avhich settlers were now pushing in ever- 
increasing numbers. Each of the states had indefinable claims 
to expansion westward. It was evident to every clear-sighted 
man that the jostling of these claims must lead in the long run 
to war, imless the Central Government could take on their ap- 
portionment. The feebleness of the Central Government, its 
lack of concentration, became so much of an inconvenience and 
so manifest a danger that there was some secret discussion of 
a monarchy, and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, the presi- 
dent of Congress, caused Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother 
of Frederick the Great, to be approached on the subject. Finally 
a constitutional convention was called in 1787 at Philadelphia, 
and there it was that the present constitution of the United 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 847 

States was in its broad lines hammered out. A great change 
of spirit had gone on during the intervening years, a wide- 
spread realization of the need of unity. 

When the Articles of Confederation were drawn up, men 
had thought of the people of Virginia, the people of Massa- 
chusetts, the people of Khode Island, and the like; but now 
there appears a new conception, ^'the people of the United 
States." The new government, with the executive President, 
the senators, congressmen, and the Supreme Court, that was 
now created, was declared to be the government of ''the people 
of the United States" ; it was a synthesis and not a mere 
assembly. It said ''we the people," and not "we the states," as 
Lee of Virginia bitterly complained. It was to be a "federal" 
and not a confederate government. 

State by state the new constitution was ratified, and in the 
spring of 1788 the first congress upon the new lines assembled 
at New York, under the presidency of George Washington, who 
had been the national commander-in-chief throughout the War 
of Independence. The constitution then underwent considerable 
revision, and Washington upon the Potomac was selected as 
the Federal capital. 

§ 6 

In an earlier chapter we have described the Roman republic, 
and its mixture of modern features with dark superstition and 
primordial savagery, as the ISTeanderthal anticipation of the 
modern democratic state. A time may come when people will 
regard the contrivances and machinery of the American con- 
stitution as the political equivalents of the implements and 
contrivances of ISI'eolithic man. They have served their purpose 
well, and under their protection the people of the States have 
grown into one of the greatest, most powerful, and most civilized 
communities that the world has yet seen ; but there is no rea- 
son in that for regarding the American constitution as a thing 
more final and inalterable than the pattern of street railway 
that overshadows many ISTew York thoroughfares, or the excel- 
lent and homely type of house architecture that still prevails in 
Philadelphia. These things also have served a purpose well, 
they have their faults, and they can be improved. Our po- 
litical contrivances, just as much as our domestic and mechan- 



848 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ical contrivances, need to undergo constant revision as knowl- 
edge and understanding grow. 

Since the American constitution was planned, our conception 
of history and our knowledge of collective psychology has un- 
dergone very considerable development. We are beginning to 
see many things in the problem of government tO' which the 
men of the eighteenth century were blind; and, courageous as 
their constructive disposition was in relation to whatever po- 
litical creation had gone before, it fell far short of the boldness 
which we in these days realize to be needful if this great human 
problem of establishing a civilized community of will in the 
earth is to be solved. They took many things for granted that 
now we know need to be made the subject of the most exacting 
scientific study and the most careful adjustment. They thought 
it was only necessary to set up schools and colleges, with a grant 
of land for maintenance, and that they might then be left to 
themselves. But education is not a weed that will grow lustily 
in any soil, it is a necessary and delicate crop that may easily 
wilt and degenerate. We learn nowadays that the under-de- 
velopment of universities and educational machinery is like 
some under-development of the brain and nerves, which hampers 
the whole growth of the social body. By European standards, 
by the standard of any state that has existed hitherto, the level 
of the common education of America is high ; but by the stand- 
ard of what it might be, America is an uneducated country. 
And those fathers of America thought also that they had but 
to leave the press free, and everyone would live in the light. They 
did not realize that a free press could develop a sort of consti- 
tutional venality due to its relations with advertisers, and that 
large newspaper proprietors could become buccaneers of opinion 
and insensate wreckers of good beginnings. And, finally, the 
makers of America had no knowledge of the complexities of 
vote manipulation. The whole science of elections was beyond 
their ken, they knew nothing of the need of the transferable 
vote to prevent the "working" of elections by specialized organi- 
zations, and the crude and rigid methods they adopted left 
their political system the certain prey of the great party ma- 
chines that have robbed American democracy of half its free- 
dom and most of its political soul. Politics became a trade, 
and a very base trade; decent and able men, after the first 
great period, drifted out of politics and attended to ''business," 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 



849 



and what I have called elsewhere the "sense of the state" ^ de- 
clined. Private enterprise ruled in many matters of common 
concern, because political corruption made collective enterprise 
impossible. 

Yet the defects of the great political system created by the 
Americans of the revolutionary period did not appear at once. 
For several generations the history of the United States was 
one of rapid expansion and of an amount of freedom, homely 
happiness, and energetic work unparalleled in the world's his- 
tory. And the record of America for the whole last century 
and a half, in spite of many reversions towards inequality, in 
spite of much rawness and .^_^^^_____^.^__^^____ 
much blundering, is never- 1""""^^ ^-s^sss^. :n.itr 

theless as bright and honour- 
able a story as that of any 
other contemporary people. 

In this brief account of 
the creation of the United 
States of America we have 
been able to do little more 
than mention the names of 
some of the group of great 
men who made this new de- 
parture in human history. 
We have named casually or 
we have not even named such 
men as Tom Paine, Ben- 
jamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, the Adam 
cousins, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washing- 
ton. It is hard to measure the men of one period of history 
with those in another. Some writers, even American writers, 
impressed by the artificial splendours of the European courts 
and by the tawdry and destructive exploits of a Frederick the 
Great or a Great Catherine, display a snobbish shame of some- 
thing homespun about these makers of America. They feel that 
Benjamin Franklin at the court of Louis XVI, with his long 
hair, his plain clothes, and his pawky manner, was sadly lacking 
in aristocratic distinction. But stripped to their personalities, 
Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or noble-minded enough 
to be Franklin's valet. If human greatness is a matter of scale 
* Wells, The Future in America. 




"Bcnjatnin. TranklirL^ 



850 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



and glitter, then no doubt Alexander the Great is at the apex of 
human greatness. But is greatness that ? Is not a great man 
rather one who, in a great position or amidst great opportunities 
— and great gifts are no more than great opportunities — serves 
God and his fellows with a humble heart ? And quite a num- 
ber of these Americans of the revolutionary time do seem to 
have displayed much disinterestedness and devotion. They were 
limited men, fallible men; Washington was, for example, a 
conspicuously indolent man; but on the whole they seemed 
to have cared more for the coiranonweal they were creating 
than for any personal end or personal vanity. 

They were all limited 
men. They were limited in 
knowledge and outlook ; they 
were limited by the limita- 
tions of the time. And there 
was no perfect man among 
them. They were, like all of 
us, men of mixed motives; 
good impulses arose in their 
minds, great ideas swept 
through them, and also they 
could be jealous, lazy, ob- 
stinate, greedy, vicious. If 
one were to write a true, 
full, and particular history 
of the making of the United 
States, it would have to be written with charity and high spirits 
as a splendid comedy. And in no other regard do we find the 
rich tortuous humanity of the American story so finely dis- 
played as in regard to slavery. Slavery, having regard to the 
general question of labour, is the test of this new soul in the 
world's history, the American soul. 

Slavery began very early in the European history of America, 
and no European people who went to America can be held 
altogether innocent in the matter. At a time when the German 
is still the moral whipping-boy of Europe, it is well to note 
that the German record is in this respect the best of all. Al- 
most the first outspoken utterances against negro slavery came 
from German settlers in Pennsylvania. But the German set- 
tler was working with free labour upon a temperate country- 




"Wa^liirurtcm. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 851 

side, well north of the plantation zone ; he was not under serious 
temptation in this matter. American slavery began with the 
enslavement of Indians for gang work in mines and upon planta- 
tions, and it is curious to note that it was a very good and 
humane man indeed. Las Casas, who urged that negroes should 
be brought to America to relieve his tormented Indian proteges. 
The need for labour upon the plantations of the West Indies 
and the south was imperative. When the supply of Indian 
captives proved inadequate, the planters turned not only to the 
negro, but to the jails and poorhouses of Europe for a supply 
of toilers. The reader of Defoe's Moll Flanders will learn how 
the business of Virginian white slavery looked to an intelligent 
Englishman in the early eighteenth century. But the negro 
came very early. The year (1620) that saw the Pilgrim 
Fathers landing at Plymouth in New England, saw a Dutch 
sloop disembarking the first cargo of negroes at Jamestown in 
Virginia. Negro slavery was as old as ISTew England; it had 
been an American institution for over a century and a half 
before the War of Independence, It was to struggle on for 
the better part of a century more. 

But the conscience of thoughtful men in the colonies was 
never quite easy upon this score, and it was one of the accusa- 
tions of Thomas Jefferson against the crown and lords of Great 
Britain that every attempt to ameliorate or restrain the slave 
trade on the part of the colonists had been checked by the great 
proprietary interests in the mother country.^ With the moral 
and intellectual ferment of the revolution, the question of negro 
slavery came right into the foreground of the public conscience. 
The contrast and the challenge glared upon the mind. ''All 
men are by nature free and equal," said the Virginia Bill of 
Bights, and outside in the sunshine, under the whip of the over- 
seer, toiled the negro slave. 

It witnesses to the great change in human ideas since the 
Roman Imperial system dissolved under the barbarian inrush. 
that there could be this heart-searching. Conditions of indus- 
try, production, and land tenure had long prevented any re- 
crudescence of gang slavery ; but now the cycle had come round 
again, and there were enormous immediate advantages to be 
reaped by the owning and ruling classes in the revival of that 
» In 1776 Lord Dartmouth wrote that the colonists could not be allowed 
"to check or discourage a traffic so beneficent to the nation." 



852 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ancient institution in mines, upon plantations, and upon g;reat 
public works. It was revived — but against great opposition. 
From the beginning of the revival there were protests, and they 
grew. The revival was counter to the new conscience of man- 
kind. In some respects the new gang slavery was worse than 
anything in the ancient world. Peculiarly horrible was 
the provocation by the trade of slave wars and man hunts in 
Western Africa, and the cruelties of the long transatlantic voy- 
age. The poor creatures were packed on the ships often with 
insufficient provision of food and water, without proper sanita- 
tion, without medicines. Many who could tolerate slavery upon 
the plantations found the slave trade too much for their moral 
digestions. Three European nations were chiefly concerned in 
this dark business, Britain, Spain, and Portugal, because they 
were the chief owners of the new lands in America. The com- 
parative innocence of the other European powers is to be as- 
cribed largely to their lesser temptations. They w^cre similar 
communities; in parallel circumstances they would have be- 
haved similarly. 

Throughout the middle part of the eighteenth century there 
was an active agitation against negro slavery in Great Britain 
as well as in the States. It was estimated that in 1770 there 
were fifteen thousand slaves in Britain, mostly brought over 
by their owners from the West Indies and Virginia. In 1771 
the issue came to a conclusive test in Britain before Lord Mans- 
field. A negro named James Somersett had been brought to 
England from Virginia by his owner. He ran away, was cap- 
tured, and violently taken on a ship to be returned to Virginia. 
Erom the ship he was extracted by a writ of habeas corpus. 
Lord Mansfield declared that slavery was a condition unknown 
to English law, an "odious" condition, and Somersett walked 
out of the court a free man. 

The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had declared that 
"all men are born free and equal." A certain negro, Quaco, put 
this to the test in 1783, and in that year the soil of Massachu- 
setts became like the soil of Britain, intolerant of slavery; to 
tread upon it was to become free. At that time no other state 
in the Union followed this example. At the census of 1790, 
Massachusetts, alone of all the states, returned "no slaves." 

The state of opinion in Virginia is remarkable, because it 
brings to light the peculiar difficulties of the southern states. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 853 

The great Virginian statesmen, such as Washington and Jef- 
ferson, condemned the institution, yet because there was no 
other form of domestic service, Washington owned slaves. There 
was in Virginia a strong party in favour of emancipating 
slaves. But they demanded that the emancipated slaves should 
leave the state within a year or be outlawed ! They were 
naturally alarmed at the possibility that a free barbaric black 
community, many of its members African-born and reeking with 
traditions of cannibalism and secret and dreadful religious rites, 
should arise beside them upon Virginian soil. When we con- 
sider that point of view, we can understand why it was that a 
large number of Virginians should be disposed to retain the 
mass of blacks in the country under control as slaves, while at 
the same time they were bitterly opposed to the slave trade and 
the importation of any fresh blood from Africa. The free 
blacks, one sees, might easily become a nuisance; indeed the 
free state of Massachusetts presently closed its borders to their 
entry. . . . The question of slavery, which in the ancient world 
was usually no more than a question of status between indi- 
viduals racially akin, merged in America with the different and 
profounder question of relationship between two races at oppo- 
site extremes of the human species and of the most contrasted 
types of tradition and culture. If the black man had been 
white, there can be little doubt that negro slavery, like white 
servitude, would have vanished from the United States within 
a generation of the Declaration of Independence as a natural 
consequence of the statements in that declaration. 



We have told of the War of Independence in America as the 
first great break away from the system of European monarchies 
and foreign offices, as the repudiation by a new community of 
Machiavellian statescraft as the directive form of human affairs. 
Within a decade there came a second and much more portentous 
revolt against this strange game of Great Powers, this tangled 
interaction of courts and policies which obsessed Europe. But 
this time it was no breaking away at the outskirts. In France, 
the nest and home of Grand Monarchy, the heart and centre of 
Europe, came this second upheaval. And, unlike the American 



854 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

colonists, who simply repudiated a king, the French, following 
in the footsteps of the English revolution, beheaded one. 

Like the British revolution and like the revolution in the 
United States, the French revolution can be traced back to 
the ambitious absurdities of the French monarchy. The schemes 
of aggrandisement, the aims and designs of the Grand Monarch, 
necessitated an expenditure upon war equipment throughout 
Europe out of all proportion to the taxable capacity of the age. 
And even the splendours of monarchy were enormously costly, 
measured by the productivity of the time. In France, just as 
in Britain and in America, the first resistance was made not to 
the monarch as such and to his foreig-n policy as such, nor with 
any clear recognition of these things as the roots of the trouble, 
but merely to the inconveniences and charges upon the indi- 
vidual life caused by them. The practical taxable capacity of 
France must have been relatively much less than that of Eng- 
land because of the various exemptions of the nobility and 
clergy. The burthen resting directly upon the common people 
was heavier. That made the upper classes the confederates of 
the court instead of the antagonists of the court as they were 
in England, and so prolonged the period of waste further; but 
when at last the bursting-point did come, the explosion was more 
violent and shattering. 

During the years of the American War of Independence there 
were few signs of any impending explosion in France. There 
was much misery among the lower classes, much criticism and 
satire, much outspoken liberal thinking, but there was little to 
indicate that the thing as a whole, with all its customs, usages, 
and familiar discords, might not go on for an indefinite time. 
It was consuming beyond its powers of production, but as yet 
only the inarticulate classes were feeling the pinch. Gibbon, 
the historian, knew France well ; Paris was as familiar to him 
as London ; but there is no suspicion to be detected in the pas- 
sage we have quoted that days of political and social dissolution 
were at hand. ISTo doubt the world abounded in absurdities and 
injustices, yet nevertheless, from the point of view of a scholar 
and a gentleman, it was fairly comfortable, and it seemed fairly 
secure. 

There was much liberal thought, speech, and sentiment in 
France at this time. Parallel with and a little later than John 
Locke in England, Montesquieu (1689-1755) in France, in the 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 855 

earlier half of the eighteenth century, had subjected social, po- 
litical, and religious institutions to the same searching and 
fundamental analysis, especially in his Esprit des Lois. He 
had stripped the magical prestige from the absolutist monarchy 
in France. He shares with Locke the credit for clearing away 
many of the false ideas that had hitherto prevented deliberate 
and conscious attempts to reconstruct human society. It was 
not his fault if at first some extremely unsound and imperma- 
nent shanties were run up on the vacant site. The generation 
that followed him in the middle and later decades of the eight- 
eenth century was boldly speculative upon the moral and intel- 
lectual clearings he had made. A group of brilliant writers, 
the "Encyclopa?dists," mostly rebel spirits from the excellent 
schools of the Jesuits, set themselves under the leadership of 
Diderot to scheme out, in a group of works, a new world (1766). 
The glory of the Encylopsedists, says Mallet, lay "in their hatred 
of things unjust, in their denunciation of the trade in slaves, 
of the inequalities of taxation, of the corruption of justice, of 
the wastefulness of wars, in their dreams of social progress, in 
their sympathy with the rising empire of industry which was 
beginning to transform the world." Their chief error seems 
to have been an indiscriminate hostility to religion. They be- 
lieved that man was naturally just and politically competent, 
whereas his impulse to social service and self-forgetfulness is 
usually developed only through an education essentially re- 
ligious, and sustained only in an atmosphere of honest co-opera- 
tion. TJnco-ordinated human initiatives lead to nothing but 
social chaos. 

Side by side with the Encyclopfedists were the Economists or 
Physiocrats, who were making bold and crude inquiries into 
the production and distribution of food and goods. Morally, 
the author of the Code de la Nature, denounced the institution 
of private property and proposed a communistic organization 
of society. He was the precursor of that large and various 
school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century who 
are lumped together as Socialists. 

Both the Encyclopaxlists and the various Economists and 
Physiocrats demanded a considerable amount of hard thinking 
in their disciples. An easier and more popular leader to follow 
was Rousseau (1712-78). He displayed a curious mingling 
of logical rigidity and sentimental enthusiasm. He preached 



856 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the alluring doctrine that the primitive state of man was one 
of virtue and happiness, from which he had declined through 
the rather inexplicable activities of priests, kings, lawyers, and 
the like. Eousseau's intellectual influence was on the whole 
demoralizing. It struck not only at the existing social fabric, 
but at any social organization. When he wrote of the Social 
Contract, he seemed rather to excuse breaches of the covenant 
than to emphasize its necessity. Man is so far from perfect, 
that a writer who apparently sustained the thesis that the al- 
most universal disposition, against which we all have to fortify 
ourselves, to repudiate debts, misbehave sexually, and evade 
the toil and expenses of education for ourselves and others, is 
not after all a delinquency, but a fine display of Natural Virtue, 
was bound to have a large following in every class that could 
read him. Rousseau's tremendous vogue did much to popularize 
a sentimental and declamatory method of dealing with social 
and political problems. 

We have already remarked that hitherto no human commu- 
nity has begun to act upon theory. There must first be some 
breakdown and necessity for direction that lets theory into her 
own. Up to 1788 the republican and anarchist talk and writing 
of French thinkers must have seemed as ineffective and po- 
litically unimportant as the aesthetic socialism of William 
Morris at the end of the nineteenth century. There was the 
social and political system going on with an effect of invincible 
persistence, the king hunting and mending his clocks, the court 
and the world of fashion pursuing their pleasures, the financiers 
conceiving continually more enterprising extensions of credit, 
business blundering clumsily along its ancient routes, much in- 
commoded by taxes and imposts, the peasants worrying, toiling, 
and suffering, full of a hopeless hatred of the nobleman's 
chateau. Men talked — and felt they were merely talking. Any- 
thing might be said, because nothing would ever happen. 



The first jar to this sense of the secure continuity of life in 
France came in 1787, Louis XVI (1774-92) was a dull, ill- 
educated monarch, and he had the misfortune to be married to 
a silly and extravagant woman, Marie Antoinette, the sister of 
the Austrian emperor. The question of her virtue is one of 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 857 

profound interest to a certain type of historical writer, but we 
need not discuss it here. She lived, as Paul Wiriath ^ puts it, 
"side by side, but not at the side" of her husband. She was 
rather heavy-featured, but not so plain as to prevent her posing 
as a beautiful, romantic, and haughty queen. When the ex- 
chequer was exhausted by the war in America (an enterprise 
to weaken England of the highest Machiavellian quality), when 
the whole country was uneasy with discontents, she set her in- 
fluence to thwart the attempts at economy of the king's minis- 
ters, to encourage every sort of aristocratic extravagance, and 
to restore the church and the nobility to the position they had 
held in the great days of Louis XIV. ISTon-aristocratic officers 
were to be weeded from the army ; the power of the church over 
private life was to be extended. She found in an upper-class 
official, Calonne, her ideal minister of finance. From 1783-87 
this wonderful man produced money as if by magic — and as if 
by magic it disappeared again. Then in 1787 he collapsed. He 
had piled loan on loan, and now he declared that the monarchy, 
the Grand Monarchy that had ruled France since the days of 
Louis XIV, was bankrupt. Xo more money could be raised. 
There must be a gathering of the notables of the kingdom to 
consider the situation. 

To the gathering of notables, a summoned assembly of lead- 
ing men, Calonne propounded a scheme for a subsidy to he 
levied upon all landed property. This roused the aristocrats to 
a pitch of great indignation. They demanded the summoning 
of a body roughly equivalent to the British parliament, the 
States General, which had not met since 1610. Eegardless of 
the organ of opinion they were creating for the discontents 
below them, excited only by the proposal that they should bear 
part of the weight of the financial burthens of the country, the 
French notables insisted. And in May, 1789, the States 
General met. 

It was an assembly of the representatives of three orders, the 
nobles, the clergy, and the Third Estate, the commons. For 
the Third Estate the franchise was very wide, nearly every tax- 
payer of twenty-five having a vote. (The parish priests voted 
as clergy, the small noblesse as nobles.) The States General 
was a body without any tradition of procedure. Enquiries were 
sent to the antiquarians of the Academy of Inscriptions in that 
* Article "France," Encyclopcedia Britannica. 



858 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

matter. Its opening deliberations turned on the question 
whether it was to meet as one body or as three, each estate hav- 
ing an equal vote. Since the Clergy numbered 308, the Nobles 
285, and the Deputies 621, the former arrangement would put 
the Commons in an absolute majority, the latter gave them 
one vote in three. Nor had the States General any meeting- 
place. Should it meet in Paris or in some provincial city ? 
Versailles was chosen, ''because of the hunting." 

It is clear that the king and queen meant to treat this fuss 
about the national finance as a terrible bore, and to allow it to 
interfere with their social routine as little as possible. We 
find the meetings going on in salons that were not wanted, in 
orangeries and tennis-courts, and so forth. 

The question whether the voting was to be by the estates or 
by head was clearly a vital one. It was wrangled over for six 
weeks. The Third Estate, taking a leaf from the book of the 
English House of Commons, then declared that it alone repre- 
sented the nation, and that no taxation must be levied hence- 
forth without its consent. Whereupon the king closed the hall 
in which it was sitting, and intimated that the deputies had 
better go home. Instead, the deputies met in a convenient ten- 
nis-court, and there took oath, the Oath of the Tennis Court, 
not to separate until they had established a constitution in 
France. 

The king took a high line, and attempted to disperse the 
Third Estate by force. The soldiers refused to act. On that 
the king gave in with a dangerous suddenness, and accepted 
the principle that the Three Estates should all deliberate and 
vote together as one National Assembly. Meanwhile, appar- 
ently at the queen's instigation, foreign regiments in the French 
service, who could be trusted to act against the people, were 
brought up from the provinces under the Marshal de Broglie, 
and the king prepared to go back upon his concessions. Where- 
upon Paris and France revolted. Broglie hesitated to fire on 
the crowds. A provisional city government was set up in Paris 
and in most of the other large cities, and a new armed force, 
the National Guard, a force designed primarily and plainly 
to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into existence by 
these municipal bodies. 

The revolt of July 1789 was really the effective French revo- 
lution. The grim-looking prison of the Bastille, very feebly 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 859 

defended, was stormed by the people of Paris, and the insur- 
rection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and 
north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility 
were burnt by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, 
and the owners murdered or driven away. The insurrection 
spread throughout France. In a month the ancient and decayed 
system of the aristocratic order had collapsed. jMany of the 
leading princes and courtiers of the queen's party fled abroad. 
The National Assembly found itself called upon to create a new 
political and social system for a new age. 

§ 9 

The French National Assembly was far less fortunate in the 
circumstances of its task than the American Congress. The 
latter had half a continent to itself, with no possible antagonist 
but the British Government. Its religious and educational 
organizations were various, collectively not very powerful, and 
on the whole friendly. King George was far away in England, 
and sinking slowly towards an imbecile condition. Neverthe- 
less, it took the United States several years to hammer out a 
working constitution. The French, on the other hand, were 
surrounded by aggressive neighbours with Machiavellian ideas, 
they were encumbered by a king and court resolved to make 
mischief, and the church was one single great organization in- 
extricably bound up with the ancient order. The queen was in 
close correspondence with the Count of Artois, the Duke of 
Bourbon, and the other exiled princes who were trying to induce 
Austria and Prussia to attack the new French nation. More- 
over, France was already a bankrupt country, while the United 
States had limitless undeveloped resources ; and the revolution, 
by altering the conditions of land tenure and marketing, had 
produced an economic disorganization that has no parallel in 
the case of America. 

These were the unavoidable difficulties of the situation. But 
in addition the Assembly made difficulties for itself. There 
was no orderly procedure. The English House of Commons had 
had more than five centuries of experience in its work, and 
Mirabeau, one of the great leaders of the early Revolution, tried 
in vain to have the English rules adopted. But the feeling of 
the times was all in favour of outcries, dramatic interruptions, 



860 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and such-like manifestations of Natural Virtue. And the dis- 
order did not come merely from the assembly. There was a 
great gallery, much too great a gallery, for strangers ; but who 
would restrain the free citizens from having a voice in the na- 
tional control ? This gallery swarmed with people eager for a 
''scene," ready to applaud or shout down the speakers below. 
The abler speakers were obliged to play to the gallery, and take 
a sentimental and sensational line. It was easy at a crisis to 
bring in a mob to kill debate. 

So encumbered, the Assembly set about its constructive task. 
On the Fourth of August it achieved a great dramatic success. 
Led by several of the liberal nobles, it made a series of resolu- 
tions, abolishing serfdom, privileges, tax exemptions, tithes, and 
feudal courts. (In many parts of the country, however, these 
resolutions were not carried into effect until three or four years 
later.) Titles went with these other renunciations. Long be- 
fore France was a republic it was an offence for a nobleman to 
sign his name with his title. For six weeks the Assembly de- 
voted itself, with endless opportunities for rhetoric, to the 
formulation of a Declaration of the Rights of Man — on the 
lines of the Bills of Rights that were the English preliminaries 
to organized change. Meanwhile the court plotted for reaction, 
and the people felt that the court was plotting. The story is 
complicated here by the scoundrelly schemes of the king's 
cousin, Philip of Orleans, who hoped to use the discords of 
the time to replace Louis on the French throne. His gardens 
at the Palais Royal were thrown open to the public, and became 
a great centre of advanced discussion. His agents did much 
to intensify the popular suspicion of the king. And things were 
exacerbated by a shortage of provisions — for which the king's 
government was held guilty. 

Presently the loyal Flanders regiment appeared at Versailles. 
The royal family was scheming to get farther away from Paris 
— in order to undo all that had been done, to restore tyranny 
and extravagance. Such constitutional monarchists as General 
Lafayette were seriously alarmed. And just at this time oc- 
curred an outbreak of popular indignation at the scarcity of 
food, that passed by an easy transition into indignation against 
the threat of royalist reaction. It was believed that there was 
an abundance of provisions at Versailles; that food was being 
kept there away from the people. The public mind had been 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 861 

much disturbed bj reports, possibly by exaggerated reports, of a 
recent banquet at Versailles, hostile to the nation. Here are some 
extracts from Carlyle descriptive of that unfortunate feast. 

"The Hall of the Opera is granted ; the Salon d'llercule shall 
be drawing-room. Not only the Officers of Flandre, but of the 
Swiss, of the Hundred Swiss; nay of the Versailles National 
Guard, such of them as have any loyalty, shall feast ; it will be 
a Repast like few. 

"And now suppose this Eepast, the solid part of it, trans- 
acted; and the first bottle over. Suppose the customary loyal 
toasts drunk ; the King's health, the Queen's with deafening 
vivats ; that of the nation 'omitted,' or even 'rejected.' Suppose 
champagne flowing ; with pot-valorous speech, with instnimental 
music ; empty featherheads growing ever the noisier, in their 
own emptiness, in each other's noise. Her Majesty, who looks 
unusually sad to-night (His Majesty sitting dulled with the 
day's hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. 
Behold ! She enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like 
the Moon from clouds, this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts ; 
royal Husband by her side, young Dauphin in her arms ! She 
descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and acclaim; walks 
queen-like round the Tables; gracefully nodding; her looks 
full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of 
France on her mother-bosom ! And now, the band striking up, 
Richard, mon Roi, Vunivers t' ahandonne (Oh Eichard, O 
my king, the world is all forsaking thee), could man do other 
than rise to height of pity, of loyal valour ? Could feather- 
headed young ensigns do other than, by white Bourbon Cock- 
ades, handed them from fair fingers; by waving of swords, 
drawn to pledge the Queen's health ; by trampling of iSTational 
Cockades ; by scaling the Boxes, whence intrusive murmurs 
may come ; by vociferation, sound, fury and distraction, within 
doors and without — testify what tempest-tost state of vacuity 
they are in? . . . 

"A natural Eepast; in ordinary times, a harmless one: now 
fatal. . . . Poor ill-advised Marie Antoinette ; with a woman's 
vehemence, not with a sovereigir's foresight ! It was so natural, 
yet so unwise. Next day, in public speech of ceremony, her 
Majesty declares herself 'delighted with Thursday.' " 

And here to set against this is Carlyle's picture of the mood 
of the people. 



862 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

"In squalid garret, on Monday morning Maternity awakes, to 
hear children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the 
streets, to the herb-makers and bakers'-queues ; meets there with 
hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we 
unhappy women ! But, instead of bakers'-queues, why not to 
Aristocrats' palaces, the root of the matter? Allans! Let us 
assemble. To the Hotel-de-Ville ; to Versailles. . . ." 

There was much shouting and coming and going in Paris be- 
fore this latter idea realized itself. One Maillard appeared 
with organizing power, and assumed a certain leadership. There 
can be little doubt that the revolutionary leaders, and partic- 
ularly General Lafayette, used and organized this outbreak 
to secure the king, before he could slip away — as Charles I 
did to Oxford — to begin a civil war. As the afternoon wore on, 
the procession started on its eleven mile tramp. . . . 

Again we quote Carlyle : 

"Maillard has halted his draggled Menads on the last hill- 
top; and now Versailles, and the Chateau of Versailles, and 
far and wide the inheritance of Royalty opens to the wondering 
eye. From far on the right, over Marly and Saint-Germain- 
en-Laye; round towards Eambouillet, on the left, beautiful 
all ; softly embosomed ; as if in sadness, in the dim moist 
w'eather ! And near before us is Versailles, New and Old ; 
with that broad frondent Avenue de Versailles between — stately 
frondent, broad, three hundred feet as men reckon, with its 
four rows of elms ; and then the Chateau de Versailles, ending 
in royal parks and pleasances, gleaming lakelets, arbours, laby- 
rinths, the Menagerie, and Great and Little Trianon. High- 
towered dw^ellings, leafy pleasant places; where the gods of 
this lower world abide: whence, nevertheless, black care cannot 
be excluded ; whither Monadic hunger is even now advancing, 



vrsi 



armed with pike-th^^ 

Rain fell as the evening closed. 

"Behold the Esplanade, over all its spacious expanse, is cov- 
ered with groups of squalid dripping women ; of lank-haired 
male rascality, armed with axes, rusty pikes, old muskets, iron- 
shod clubs (batons ferres, which end in knives or swordblades, 
a kind of extempore billhook) ; looking nothing but hungry re- 
volt. The rain pours ; Gardes-du-Corps so caracoling through 
the groups 'amid hisses' ; irritating and agitating what is but 
dispersed here to reunite there. . . . 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 863 

"Innumerable squalid women beleaguer the President and 
Deputation; insist on going with him: has not his Majesty him- 
self, looking from the window, sent out to ask, What we wanted ? 
'Bread, and speech with the King/ that was the answer. Twelve 
women are clamonrously added to the deputation ; and march 
with it, across the Esplanade ; through dissipated groups, cara- 
coling bodyguards and the pouring rain." 

"Bread and not too much talking !" Natural demands. 

"One learns also that the royal Carriages are getting yoked, 
as if for Metz. Carriages, royal or not, have verily showed 
themselves at the back gates. They even produced, or quoted, a 
written order from our Versailles Municipality — which is a 
monarchic not a democratic one. However, Versailles patrols 
drove them in again; as the vigilant I^cointre had strictly 
charged them to do. . . . 

"So sink the shadows of night, blustering, rainy; and all 
paths gTOw dark. Strangest night ever seen in these regions; 
perhaps since the Bartholomew Night, when Versailles, as 
Bassompierre writes of it, was a chetif chateau. 

"O for the lyre of some Orpheus, to constrain, with touch of 
melodious strings, these mad masses into Order ! For here all 
seems fallen asunder, in wide-yawning dislocation. The high- 
est, as in down-rushing of a world, is come in contact with the 
lowest: the rascality of France beleaguering the royalty of 
France; 'iron-shod batons' lifted round the diadem, not to 
guard it ! With denunciations of bloodthirsty anti-national 
body-guards, are heard dark growlings against a queenly 
name. 

"The Court sits tremulous, powerless: varies with the vary- 
ing temper of the Esplanade, with the varying colour of the 
rumours from Paris. Thick-coming rumours ; now of peace, 
now of war. Necker and all the Ministers consult ; with a 
blank issue. The CEil-de-Boeuf is one tempest of whispers : We 
will fly to Metz ; we will not fly. The royal carriages again 
attempt egress — though for trial merely ; they are again driven 
in by Lecointre's patrols," 

But we must send the reader to Carlyle to learn of the com- 
ing of the National Guard in the night under General Lafayette 
himself, the bargaining between the Assembly and the King, 
the outbreak of fighting in the morning between the bodyguard 
and the hungry besiegers, and how the latter stormed into the 



864 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

palace and came near to a massacre of tlie royal family. Lafay- 
ette and his troops turned out in time to prevent that, and timely 
cartloads of loaves arrive from Paris for the crowd. 

At last it was decided that the king should come to Paris. 

"Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman 
triumphs and ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal prog- 
resses, Irish funerals ; but this of the French Monarchy march- 
ing to its bed remained to be seen. Miles long, and of breadth 
losing itself in vagueness, for all the neighbouring country 
crowds to see. Slow : stagnating along, like shoreless Lake, 
yet with a noise like J^iagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A 
splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket- 
volleying ; the truest segment of Chaos seen in these latter Ages ! 
Till slowly it disembogue itself, in the thickening dusk, into 
expectant Paris, through a double row of faces all the way from 
Passy to the H6tel-de-Ville. 

"Consider this: Vangaiard of ISTational troops; with trains 
of artillery ; of pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, 
on carts, hackney-coaches, or on foot. . . . Loaves stuck on 
the points of bayonets, green boughs stuck in gun-barrels. Next, 
as main-march, 'fifty cart-loads of corn,' which have been 
lent, for peace, from the stores of Versailles. Behind which 
follow stragglers of the Garde-du-Corps ; all humiliated, in 
Grenadier bonnets. Close on these comes the royal carriage ; 
come royal carriages ; for there are a hundred national deputies 
too, among whom sits Mirabeau — his remarks not given. Then 
finally, pell-mell, as rear-guard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, 
other bodyguards, brigands, whosoever cannot get before. Be- 
tween and among all which masses flows without limit Saint- 
Antoine and the Menadic cohort. IMenadic especially about 
the royal carriage. . . , Covered with tricolor ; singing 'al- 
lusive songs' ; pointing with one hand to the royal carriage, 
which the allusions hit, and pointing to the provision-wagons 
with the other hand, and these words : 'Courage, Friends ! 
We shall not want bread now ; we are bringing you the Baker, 
the Bakeress and Baker's boy.' . . . 

"The wet day draggles the tricolor, but the joy is unextin- 
giiishable. Is not all well now ? 'Ah Madame, noire honne 
Beine/ said some of these Strong-women some days hence, 
'Ah, Madame, our good Queen, don't be a traitor any more 
and we will all love you!' ..." 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 865 

This was October the sixth, IT 89. For nearly two years the 
royal family dwelt unmolested in the Tuileries. Had the court 
kept common faith with the people, the king might have died 
there, a king. 

From 1789 to 1791 the early Eevolution held its own; France 
was a limited monarchy, the king kept a diminished state in 
the Tuileries, and the National Assembly ruled a country at 
peace. The reader who will glance back to the maps of Poland 
we have given in the previous chapter will realize what occu- 
pied Russia, Prussia, and Austria at this time. AVhile France 
experimented with a crowned republic in the west, the last 
division of the crowned republic of the east was in progress. 
France could wait. 

When we consider its inexperience, the conditions under 
which it worked, and the complexities of its problems, one must 
concede that the Assembly did a very remarkable amount of 
constructive work. Much of that work was sound and still en- 
dures, much was experimental and has been undone. Some 
was disastrous. There was a clearing up of the penal code; 
torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and persecutions for heresy 
were abolished. The ancient provinces of France, ISTormandy, 
Burgundy, and the like gave place to eighty departments. Pro- 
motion to the highest ranks in the army was laid open to men 
of every class. An excellent and simple system of law courts 
was set up, but its value was much vitiated by having the judges 
appointed by popular election for short periods of time. This 
made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the judges, 
like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the 
gallery. And the whole vast property of the church was seized 
and administered by the state ; religious establishments not en- 
gaged in education or works of charity were broken up, and the 
salaries of the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This 
in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy in France, 
who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the 
richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and 
bishops was made elective, which struck at the very root idea 
of the Eoman church, which centred everything upon the 
Pope, and in which all authority is from above downward. 
Practically the ISTational Assembly wanted at one blow to make 
the church in France Protestant, in organization if not in 
doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts between 



866 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the state priests created by the National Assembly and the 
recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Eome. . . . 
One curious thing the National Assembly did which greatly 
weakened its grip on affairs. It decreed that no member of 
the Assembly should be an executive minister. This was in 
imitation of the American constitution, where also ministers 
are separated from the legislature. The British method has been 
to have all ministers in the legislative body, ready to answer 
questions and account for their interpretation of the laws and 
their conduct of the nation's business. If the legislature repre- 
sents the sovereig-n people, then it is surely necessary for the 
ministers to be in the closest touch with their sovereign. This 
severance of the legislature and executive in France caused mis- 
understandings and misti-ust ; the legislature lacked control and 
the executive lacked moral force. This led to such an ineffective- 
ness in the central government that in many districts at this 
time, communes and towns were to be found that were prac- 
tically self-governing communities ; they accepted or rejected 
the commands of Paris as they thought fit, declined the pay- 
ment of taxes, and divided up the church lands according to 
their local appetites. 

§ 10 

It is quite possible that with the loyal support of the crown 
and a reasonable patriotism on the part of the nobility, the 
National Assembly, in spite of its noisy galleries, its Eousseau- 
ism, and its inexperience, might have blundered through to a 
stable form of parliamentary government for France. In Mira- 
beau it had a statesman with clear ideas of the needs of the 
time ; ho knew the strength and the defects of the British sys- 
tem, and apparently he had set himself to establish in France 
a parallel political organization upon a wider, more honest 
franchise. He had, it is true, indulged in a sort of Kuritanian 
flii-tation with the queen, seen her secretly, pronounced her very 
solemnly the "only man' about the king, and made rather a 
fool of himself in that matter, but his schemes were drawn 
upon a much larger scale than the scale of the back stairs of the 
Tuileries. By his death in 1791 France certainly lost one of 
her most constructive statesmen, and the National Assembly 
its last chance of any co-operation with the king. When there 
is a court there is usually a conspiracy, and royalist schemes 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 



867 



and royalist mischief -making were the last straw in the balance 
against the National Assembly. The royalists did not care for 
Mirabeau, they did not care 
for France ; they wanted to be 
back in their lost paradise of 
privilege, hanghtinesSi, and 
limitless expenditure, and it 
seemed to them that if only 
they could make the govern- 
ment of the National Assem- 
bly impossible, then by a sort 
of miracle the dry bones of 
the ancient regime wonld live 
again. They had no sense of 
the other possibility, the gulf 
of the republican extremists, 
that yawned at their feet. 

One June night in 1791, 
between eleven o'clock and 
midnight, the king and queen 
and their two children slipped 
out of the Tuileries disguised, 
threaded their palpitating 
way through Paris, circled 
round from the north of the 
city to the east, and got at last 
into a travelling-carriage that 
was waiting upon the road to 
Chalons. They were flying to 
the army of the east. The 
army of the east was "loyal," 
that is to say, its general and 
officers at least were prepared 
to betray France to the king 
and court. Here was adven- 
ture at last after the queen's 
heart, and one can understand 
the pleasurable excitement of 
the little party as the miles 
lengthened between themselves and Paris. Away over the hills 
were reverence, deep bows, and the kissing of hands. Then back 




868 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to Versailles. A little shooting of the mob in Paris — artillery, 
if need be. A few executions — but not of the sort of people who 
matter. A White Terror for a few months. Then all would be 
well again. PerhajDs Calonne might return, too, with fresh 
financial expedients. He was busy just then gathering support 
among the Gennan pii*inces. There were a lot of chateaux to re- 
build, but the people who burnt them down could hardly com- 
plain if the task of rebuilding them pressed rather heavily upon 
their gi-imy necks. . . . 

All such bright anticipations were cruelly dashed that night 
at Varennes. The king had been recognized at Sainte Mene- 
hould by the landlord of the post house, and as the night fell, 
the eastward roads clattered with galloping messengers rousing 
the country, and trying to intercept the fugitives. There were 
fresh horses waiting in the upper village of Varennes — the 
young officer in charge had given the king up for the night and 
gone to bed — while for half an hour in the lower village the 
poor king, disgiiised as a valet, disputed with his postillions, who 
had expected reliefs in the lower village and refused to go 
further. Finally they consented to go on. They consented too 
late. The little partj found the postmaster from Sainte Mene- 
hould, who had ridden past while the postillions wrangled, and 
a number of worthy republicans of Varennes whom he had 
gathered together, awaiting them at the bridge between the two 
parts of the town. The bridge was barricaded. Muskets were 
thrust into the carriage: ''Your passports?" 

The king surrendered without a struggle. The little party 
was taken into the house of some village functionary. "Well," 
said the king, "here you have me !" Also he remarked that 
he was hungry. At dinner he commended the wine, "quite 
excellent wine." What the queen said is not recorded. There 
were royalist troops at hand, but they attempted no rescue. 
The tocsin began to ring, and the village "illuminated itself," 
to guard against surprise. . . . 

A very crestfallen coachload of royalty returned to Paris, 
and was received by vast crowds — in silence. The word had 
gone forth that whoever insulted the king should be thrashed, 
and whoever applauded him should be killed. . . . 

It was only after this foolish exploit that the idea of a re- 
public took hold of the French mind. Before this flight to 
Varennes there was no doubt much abstract republican senti- 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 869 

ment, but there was scarcely any expressed disposition to abol- 
ish monarchy in France. Even in July, a month after the 
flight, a great meeting in the Champ de Mars, supporting a 
petition for the dethronement of the king, was dispersed by the 
authorities, and many people were killed. But such displays 
of firmness could not prevent the lesson of that flight soaking 
into men's minds. Just as in ^ England in the days of 
Charles I, so now in France men realized that the king could 
not be trusted — ^lie was dangerous. The Jacobins grew rapidly 
in strength. Their leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, who 
had hitherto been figured as impossible extremists, began to 
dominate French afi^airs. 

These Jacobins were the equivalents of the American 
radicals, men with untrammelled advanced ideas. Their 
streng-th lay in the fact that they were unencumbered and 
downright. They were poor men with nothing to lose. The 
party of moderation, of compromise with the relics of the old 
order, was led by such men of established position as General 
Lafayette, the general who had represented France in America, 
and Mirabeau, an aristocrat who was ready to model himself 
on the rich and influential aristocrats of England. But Robes- 
pierre was a needy but clever young lawyer from Arras, whose 
most precious jDossession was his faith in Rousseau ; Danton 
was a scarcely more wealthy ban-ister in Paris, a big, gesticulat- 
ing, rhetorical figure; Marat was an older man, a Swiss of 
very great scientific distinction, but equally unembarrassed by 
possessions. On Marat's scientific standing it is necessary to 
lay stress because there is a sort of fashion among English 
writers to misrepresent the leaders of great revolutionary move- 
ments as igTiorant men. This gives a false view of the mental 
processes of revolution; and it is the task of the historian to 
correct it. Marat, we find, was conversant with English, Span- 
ish, German, and Italian ; he had spent several years in England, 
he was made an honorary M.D. of St. Andrew's, and had pub- 
lished some valuable contributions to medical science in English. 
Both Benjamin Franklin and Goethe were greatly interested 
in his work in physics. This is the man who is called by Car- 
lyle "rabid dog," "atrocious," "squalid," and "Dog-leech" — 
this last by way of tribute to his science. 

The revolution called Marat to politics, and his earliest con- 
tributions to the great discussion were fine and sane. There 



870 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

was a prevalent delusion in France that England was a land of 
liberty. His Tableau des vices de la constitution d'Angleterre 
showed the realities of the Eugiisb. jDosition. His last years 
were maddened by an almost intolerable skin disease wbicb 
he caught while hiding in the sewers of Paris to escape the 
consequences of his denunciation of the king as a traitor after 
the flight to Varennes. Only by sitting in a hot bath could 
he collect his mind to write. He had been treated hardly and 
suffered, and he became hard; nevertheless he stands out in 
history as a man of rare, unblemished honesty. His poverty 
seems particularly to have provoked the scorn of Carlyle. 

"What a road he has travelled; and sits now, about half- 
past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath ; sore afflicted ; 
ill of Eevolution Fever. . . . Excessively sick and worn, poor 
man: with precisely elevenpence halfpenny of ready-money, in 
paper ; with slipper-bath ; strong three-footed stool for writing 
on, the while : and a squalid Washerwoman for his sole houses 
hold . . . that is his civic establishment in Medical-School 
Street; thither and not elsewhere has his road led him. . . . 
Hark, a rap again! A musical woman's voice, refusing to be 
rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. 
]\Iarat, recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte 
Corday is admitted." 

The young heroine — for republican leaders are fair game, 
and their assassins are necessarily heroines and their voices 
"musical" — offered to give him some necessary information 
about the counter-revolution at Caen, and as he was occupied 
in making a note of her facts, she stabbed him with a large 
sheath knife (1792). . . . 

Such was the quality of most of the leaders of the Jacobin 
party. They were men of no pi-operty — untethered men. 
They were more dissociated and more elemental, there- 
fore, than any other party; and they were ready to push the 
ideas of freedom and equality to a logical extremity. Their 
standards of patriotic virtue were high and harsh. There was 
something inhuman even in their humanitarian zeal. They 
saw without humour the disposition of the moderates to ease 
things down, to keep the common folk just a little needy and 
respectful, and royalty (and men of substance) just a little 
respected. They were blinded by the formulae of Eousseauism 
to the historical truth that man is by nature oppressor and 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 871 

oppressed, and that it is only slowly by law, education, and the 
spirit of love in the world that men can be made happy and 
free. 

And while in America the formulae of eighteenth-century 
democracy were on the whole stimulating and helpful because 
it was already a land of open-air practical equality so far as 
white men were concerned, in France these formula? made a 
very heady and dangerous mixture for the town populations, 
because considerable parts of the towns of France were slums 
full of dispossessed, demoralized, degraded, and bitter-spirited 
people. The Parisian crowd was in a particularly desperate 
and dangerous state, because the industries of Paris had been 
largely luxury industries, and much of her employment parasitic 
on the weaknesses and vices of fashionable life. ISTow the fash- 
ionable world had gone over the frontier, travellers were re- 
stricted, business disordered, and the city full of unemployed 
and angry people. 

But the royalists, instead of realizing the significance of these 
Jacobins with their dangerous integi'ity and their dangerous 
grip upon the imagination of the mob, had the conceit to think 
they could make tools of them. The time for the replacement 
of the National Assembly under the new-made constitution by 
the "Legislative Assembly" was drawing near; and when the 
Jacobins, with the idea of breaking up the moderates, proposed 
to make the members of the ITational Assembly ineligible for 
the Legislative Assembly, the royalists supported them with 
great glee, and carried the proposal. They perceived that the 
Legislative Assembly, so clipped of all experience, must certainly 
be a politically incompetent body. They would "extract good 
from the excess of evil," and presently France would fall back 
helpless into the hands of her legitimate masters. So they 
thought. And the royalists did more than this. They backed 
the election of a Jacobin as Mayor of Paris. It was about as 
clever as if a man brought home a hungry tiger to convince 
his wife of her need of him. There stood another body ready 
at hand with which these royalists did not reckon, far better 
equipped than the court to step in and take the place of an 
ineffective Legislative Assembly, and that was the strongly 
Jacobin Commune of Paris installed at the Hotel de Yille. 

So far France had been at peace. Kone of her neighbours 



872 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

had attacked her, because she appeared to be weakening herself 
by her internal dissensions. It was Poland that suffered by the 
distraction of France. But there seemed no reason why they 
should not insult and threaten her, and prepare the way for 
a later partition at their convenience. At Pillnitz, in 1791, 
the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria met, and 
issued a declaration that the restoration of order and monarchy 
in France was a matter of interest to all sovereigns. And 
an army of emigres, French nobles and gentlemen, an army 
largely of officers, was allowed to accumulate close to the 
frontier. 

It was France that declared war against Austria. The mo- 
tives of those who supported this step were conflicting. Many 
republicans wanted it because they wished to see the kindred 
people of Belgium liberated from the Austrian yoke. Many 
royalists wanted it because they saw in war a possibility of 
restoring the prestige of the crown. Marat opposed it bitterly 
in his paper L'Avii du Peuple, because he did not want to see 
republican enthusiasm turned into war fever. His instinct 
warned him of IS'apoleon. On April 20th, 1792, the king came 
down to the Assembly and proposed war amidst gi-eat applause. 

The war began disastrously. Three French armies entered 
Belgium, two were badly beaten, and the third, under Lafayette, 
retreated. Then Prussia declared war in support of Austria, 
and the allied forces, under the Duke of Brunswick, prepared 
to invade France. The duke issued one of the most foolish 
proclamations in history; he was, he said, invading France to 
restore the royal authority. Any further indignity shown the 
king he threatened to visit upon the Assembly and Paris 
with "military execution." This was surely enough to make 
the most royalist Frenchman a republican — at least for the 
duration of the war. 

The new phase of revolution, the Jacobin revolution, was 
the direct outcome of this proclamation. It made the Legisla- 
tive Assembly, in which orderly republicans (Girondins) and 
royalists prevailed, it made the government which had put 
down that republican meeting in the Champ de Mars and hunted 
Marat into the sewers, impossible. The insurgents gathered 
at the Hotel de Ville, and on the tenth of August the Commune 
launched an attack on the palace of the Tuileries. 

The king behaved with a clumsy stupidity, and with that 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 873 

disregard for others which is the prerogative of kings. He 
had with him a Swiss gaiard of nearly a thousand men as well 
as National Guards of uncertain loyalty. He held out vaguely 
until firing began, and then he went otf to the adjacent Assem- 
bly to place himself and his family under its protection, leaving 
his Swiss fighting. No doubt he hoped to antagonize Assem- 
bly and Commune, but the Assembly had none of the fighting 
spirit of the Hotel de Ville. The royal refugees were placed 
in a box reserved for journalists (out of which a small room 
opened), and there they remained for sixteen hours while the 
^.ssembly debated their fate. Outside there were the sounds 
of a considerable battle; every now and then a window would 
break. The unfortunate Swiss were fighting with their backs 
to the wall because there was now nothing else for them to 
do. . . . 

The Assembly had no stomach to back the government's ac- 
tion of July in the Champ de Mars. The fierce vigour of the 
Commune dominated it. The king found no comfort what- 
ever in the Assembly. It scolded him and discussed his "sus- 
pension." The Swiss fought until they received a message from 
the king to desist, and then — the crowd being savagely angry 
at the needless bloodshed and out of control — they were for 
the most part massacred. 

The long and tedious attempt to "Merovingianize" Louis, 
to make an honest crowned republican out of a dull and in- 
adaptable absolute monarch, was now drawing to its tragic 
close. The Commune of Paris was practically in control of 
France. The Legislative Assembly — which had apparently un- 
dergone a change of heart — decreed that the king was suspended 
from his office, confined him in the Temple, replaced him by 
an executive commission, and summoned a National Conven- 
tion to frame a new constitution. 

The tension of patriotic and republican France was now 
becoming intolerable. Such armies as she had were rolling 
back helplessly towards Paris. Longwy had fallen, the great 
fortress of Verdun followed, and nothing seemed likely to stop 
the march of the allies upon the capital. The sense of royalist 
treachery rose to panic cruelty. At any rate the royalists had 
to be silenced and stilled and scared out of sight. The Com- 
mune set itself to hunt out every royalist that could be found, 
until the prisons of Paris were full. Marat saw the danger of 



874 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



a massacre. Before it was too late he tried to secure the estab- 
lishment of emergency tribunals to filter the innocent from the 
guilty in this miscellaneous collection of schemers, suspects, and 
harmless gentlefolk. .He was disregarded, and early in Sep- 
tember the inevitable massacre occurred. 

Suddenly, first at one prison and then at others, bands of 
insurgents took possession. A sort of rough court was consti- 



l^crdi ^Eastern Frontier 




tuted, and outside gathered a wild mob armed with sabres, 
pikes, and axes. One by one the prisoners, men and women 
alike, were led out from their cells, questioned briefly, pardoned 
with the cry of "Vive la Nation," or thrust out to the mob at 
the gates. There the crowd jostled and fought to get a slash 
or thrust at a victim. The condemned were stabbed, hacked, 
and beaten to death, their heads hewn off, stuck on pikes, and 
carried about the town, their torn bodies thrust aside. Among 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 875 

others, the Priiicesse de Lamballe, whom the king and queen 
had left behind in the Tuileries, perished. Her head was car- 
ried on a pike to the Temple for the queen to see. 

In the queen's cell were two National Guards. One would 
have had her look out and see this grisly sight. The other, in 
pity, would not let her do so. 

Even as this red tragedy w^as going on in Paris, the French 
general Dumouriez, who had rushed an army from Flanders 
into the forests of the Argonne, was holding up the advance 
of the allies beyond Verdun. On September 20th occurred a 
battle, mainly an artillery encounter, at Valmy. A not very 
resolute Prussian advance was checked, the French infantry 
stood firm, their artillery was better than the allied artillery. 
For ten days after this repulse the Duke of Brunswick hesi- 
tated, and then he began to fall back towards the Rhine. This 
battle at Valmy — it was little more than a cannonade — w^as 
one of the decisive battles in the world's history. The Kevo- 
lution was saved. 

The National Convention met on September 21st, 1792, 
and immediately proclaimed a republic. The trial and execu- 
tion of the king followed with a sort of logical necessity upon 
these things. He died rather as a symbol than as a man. There 
was nothing else to be done with him ; poor man, he cunibered 
the earth. France could not let him go to hearten the emi- 
grants, could not keep him harmless at home; his existence 
threatened her. Marat had urged this trial relentlessly, yet 
wath that acid clearness of his he would not have the king 
charged with any offence committed before he signed the consti- 
tution, because before then he was a real monarch, super-legal, 
and so incapable of being illegal. Nor would Marat permit 
attacks upon the king's counsel. . . . Throughout Marat played 
a bitter and yet often a just part ; he was a great man, a fine 
intelligence, in a skin of fire; wrung with that organic hate 
in the blood that is not a product of the mind but of the 
body. 

Louis was beheaded in January, 1793. He was guillotined — 
for since the previous August the guillotine had been in use as 
the official instrument in French executions. 

Danton, in his leonine role, was very fine upon this occasion. 
''The kings of Europe would challenge us," he roared. ''We 
throw them the head of a king !" 



876 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

§ 11 

And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French 
people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France 
and the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at 
home and abroad; at home royalists and every form of dis- 
loyalty were to be stamped out; abroad France was to be the 
protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all 
the world, was to become republican. The youth of France 
poured into the Republican armies ; a new and wonderful song 
spread through the land, a song that still warms the blood like 
wine, the Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping col- 
umns of French bayonets and their enthusiastically served gims 
the foreign armies rolled back; before the end of 1792 the 
French armies had gone far beyond the utmost achievements 
of Louis XI Y; everywhere they stood 'on foreign soil. They 
were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had raided to 
Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then 
the French Government did an unwise thing. It had been ex- 
asperated by the expulsion of its representative from England 
upon the execution of Louis, and it declared war against Eng- 
land. It was an unwise thing to do, because the revolution 
which had given France a new enthusiastic infantry and a bril- 
liant artillery, released from its aristocratic officers and many 
cramping traditions, had destroyed the discipline of its navy, 
and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this provo- 
cation united all England against France, whereas there had 
been at first a very considerable liberal movement in Great 
Britain in sympathy with the revolution. 

Of the fight that France made in the next few years against 
a European coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove 
the Austrians for ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a 
republic. The Dutch fleet, frozen in the Texel, surrendered 
to a handful of cavalry without firing its guns. For some 
time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up, and it was 
only in 1796 that a new general, ISTapoleon Bonaparte, led the 
ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across Pied- 
mont to Mantua and Verona. An Outline of History cannot 
map out campaigns ; but of the new quality that had come into 
war, it is bound to take note. The old professional armies had 
fought for the fighting, as slack as workers paid by the hour; 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 877 

these wonderful new armies fought, hungry and thirsty, for vic- 
tory. Their enemies called them the "New French," Says 
C. F. Atkinson,^ "What astonished the Allies most of all was 
the number and the velocity of the Republicans. These im- 
provised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were 
unprocurable for want of money, untransportable for want of 
the enormous number of wagons that would have been required, 
and also unnecessary, for the discomfort that would have caused 
wholesale desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne 
by the men of 1793-94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of 
size could not be carried in convoys, and the French soon be- 
came familiar with 'living on the country.' Thus 1793 saw 
the birth of the modern system of war — rapidity of movement, 
full development of national strength, bivouacs, requisitions 
and force as against cautious manoeuvring, small professional 
armies, tents and full rations, and chicane. The first rep- 
resented the decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of 
risking little to gain a little. . . ." 

And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting 
the Marseillaise and fighting for La France, manifestly never 
quite clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberat- 
ing the countries into which they poured, the republican en- 
thusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious 
fashion. Marat, the one man of commanding intelligence among 
the Jacobins, was now frantic with an incurable disease, and 
presently he was murdered; Danton was a series of patriotic 
thunderstorms; the steadfast fanaticism of Robespierre domi- 
nated the situation. This man is difficult to judge; he was 
a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But 
he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He believed 
not in a god familiar to men, but in a certain Supreme Being, 
and that Rousseau was his prophet. He set himself to save 
the republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it conld be 
saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was 
to save the republic. The living spirit of the republic, it 
seemed, had sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execu- 
tion of the king. There were insurrections : one in the west, 
in the district of La Vendee, where the people rose against 
the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox 

^In his article, "French Eevohitionary Wars," in the Encyclopoedia 
Britannica. 



878 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests ; one in the south, 
where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of 
Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To 
which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on 
killing royalists. 

Nothing could have better pleased the fierce heart of the 
Paris slums. The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and 
a steady slaughtering began.^ The invention of the guillotine 
was opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, most 
of Robespierre's antagonists were guillotined, atheists Vho 
argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined, 
Danton was guillotined because he thoupht there was too much 
guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine 
chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reigii of 
Robespierre lived, it seemed, on .blood, and needed more and 
more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium, 

Danton was still Danton. leonine and exemplary upon the 
guillotine. "Danton," he said, "no weakness !" 

And the grotesque thing about the story is that Robespierre 
was indubitably honest. He was far more honest than any of 
the group of men who succeeded him. He was inspired by 
a consuming passion for a new order of human life. So far 
as he could contrive it, the Committee of Public Safety, the 
emergency government of twelve which had now thrust aside 
the Convention, constructed. The scale on which it sought to 
construct was stupendous. All the intricate problems with 
which we still struggle to-day were met by swift and shallow 
solutions. Attempts were made to equalize property. "Opu- 
lence," said St. Just, "is infamous." The property of the rich 
was taxed or confiscated in order that it should be divided 
among the poor. Every man was to have a secure house, a 
living, a wife and children. The labovirer was worthy of his 
hire, but not entitled to an advantage. There was an attempt 
to abolish profit altogether, the rude incentive of most human 
commerce since the beginning of society. Profit is the economic 
riddle that still puzzles us to-day. There were harsh laws 
against "profiteering" in France in 1793 — England in 1919 
found it necessary to make quite similar laws. And the Jac- 
obien government not only replanned — in eloquent outline — 

Mn the thirteen months before June 1794, there ware 1,220 executions; 
in the following seven weeks there were 1,376, — P. G. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 879 

the economic, but also the social system. Divorce was made as 
easy as marriage ; the distinction of legitimate and illegitimate 
children was abolished. ... A new calendar was devised, with 
new names for the months, a week of ten days, and the like — 
that has long since been swept away ; but also the clumsy coin- 
age and the tangled weights and measures of old France gave 
place to the simple and lucid decimal system that still en- 
dures. . . . There was a proposal from one extremist group to 
abolish God among other institutions altogether, and to substi- 
tute the worship of Keason. There was, indeed, a Feast of 
Keason in the cathedral of ISTotre-Dame, with a pretty actress as 
the goddess of Reason. But against this Robespierre set his 
face; he was no atheist. "Atheism," he said, "is aristocratic. 
The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed inno- 
cence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of 
the people." 

So he giullotined Hebert, who had celebrated the Feast of 
Reason, and all his party. 

A certain mental disorder became perceptible in Robespierre 
as the summer of 1794 drew on. He was deeply concerned 
with his religion. (The arrests and executions of suspects were 
going on now as briskly as ever. Through the streets of Paris 
every day rumbled the Terror with its carts full of condemned 
people.) He induced the Convention to decree that France 
believed in a Supreme Being, and in that comforting doctrine, 
the immortality of the soul. In June he celebrated a great fes- 
tival, the festival of his Supreme Being. There was a proces- 
sion to the Champ de Mars, which he headed, brilliantly ar- 
rayed, bearing a great bunch of flowers and wheat ears. Fig- 
ures of inflammatory material, representing Atheism and Vice, 
were solemnly burnt ; then, by an ingenious mechanism, and 
with some slight creakings, an incombustible statue of Wis- 
dom rose in their place. There were discourses — Robespierre 
delivered the chief one — but apparently no worship. . . . 

Thereafter Robespierre displayed a disposition to brood aloof 
from affairs. For a month he kept away from the Convention. 

One day in July he reappeared and delivered a strange speech 
that clearly foreshadowed fresh prosecutions. "Gazing on 
the multitude of vices which the torrent of Revolution has 
rolled down," he cried, in his last great speech in the Con- 
vention, "I have sometimes trembled lest I should be soiled 



880 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

by the impure neiglibourliood of wicked men. ... I know 
that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to over- 
Vt^helm a single individual ; but I know also what is the duty 
of a man who can die in the defence of humanity." . . . 

And so on to vague utterances that seemed to threaten 
everyone. 

The Convention heard this speech in silence; then when a 
proposal was made to print and circulate it, broke into a re- 
sentful uproar and refused permission. Robespierre went olf in 
bitter resentment to the club of his supporters, and re-read his 
speech to them! 

That night was full of talk and meetings and preparations 
for the morrow, and the next morning the Convention turned 
upon Robespierre. One Tallien threatened him with a dagger. 
When he tried to speak, he was shouted down, and the Presi- 
dent jingled the bell at him. ''President of Assassins," cried 
Robespierre, "I demand speech!" It was refused him. His 
voice deserted him ; he coughed and spluttered. "The blood 
of Danton chokes him," cried someone. 

He was accused and arrested there and then with his chief 
supporters. 

Whereupon the Hotel de Ville, still stoutly Jacobin, rose 
against the Convention, and Robespierre and his companions 
were snatched out of the hands of their captors. There was a 
night of gathering, marching, counter-marching; and at last, 
about three in the morning, the forces of the Convention faced 
the forces of the Commune outside the Hotel de Ville. Henriot, 
the Jacobin commander, after a busy day was drunk upstairs ; 
a parley ensued, and then, after some indecision, the soldiers 
of the Commune went over to the Government. There M^ns a 
shouting of patriotic sentiments, and someone looked out from 
the Hotel de Ville. Robespierre and his last companions found 
themselves betrayed and trapped. 

Two or three of these men threw themselves out of a window, 
and injured themselves frightfully on the railings below with- 
out killing themselves. Others attempted suicide. Robespierre, 
it seems, was shot in the lower jaw by a gendanue. He was 
found, his eyes staring from a pale face whose lower part was 
blood. 

Followed seventeen hours of agony before bis end. He spoke 
never a word during that time, his jaw being bound up roughly 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 881 

in dirty linen. He and his companions, and the broken, dying 
bodies of those who had jumped from the windows, twenty-two 
men altogether, were taken to the onillotine instead of the con- 
demned appointed for that day. Mostly his eyes were closed, 
but, says Carlyle, he opened them to see the great knife rising 
above him, and struggled. Also it would seem- he screamed when 
the executioner removed his bandages. Then the knife came 
down, swift and merciful. 

The Terror was at an end. From first to last there had been 
condemned and executed about four thousand people. 

§ 13 

It witnesses to the immense vitality and the profound Tight- 
ness of the flood of new ideals and intentions that the French 
Kevolution had released into the world of practical endeavour, 
that it could still flow in a creative torrent after it had been 
caricatured and mocked in the grotesque personality and career 
of Robespierre. He had shown its deepest thoughts, he had 
displayed anticipations of its methods and conclusions ; through 
the green and distorting lenses of his preposterous vanity and 
egotism, he had smeared and blackened all its hope and promise 
with blood and horror, and the power of these ideas was not 
destroyed. They stood the extreme tests of ridiculous and hor- 
rible presentation. After his downfall, the Republic still ruled 
unassailable. Leaderless, for his successors were a group of 
crafty or commonplace men, the European republic strnggled 
on, and presently fell and rose again, and fell and rose and 
still struggles, entangled but invincible. 

And it is well to remind the reader here of the real dimensions 
of this phase of the Terror, which strikes so vividly upon the 
imagination and which has therefore been enormously exag- 
gerated relatively to the rest of the revolution. From 1789 to 
late in 1791 the French Revolution was an orderly process, and 
from the summer of 1794 the Republic was an orderly and 
victorious state. The Terror was not the work of the whole 
country, but of the town mob which owed its existence and 
its savagery to the mJsrule and social injustice of the ancient 
regime; and the explosion of the Terror could have happened 
only through the persistent treacherous disloyalty of the royalists 
which, while it raised the extremists to frenzy, disinclined the 



882 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

mass of moderate republicans from any intervention. The 
best men were busy fighting the Austrians and royalists on 
the frontier. Altogether, we must remember, the total of the 
killed in the Terror amounted to a few thousands, and among 
those thousands there were certainly a great number of active 
antagonists whom the Republic, by all the standards of that time, 
was entitled to kill. It included such traitors and mischief- 
makers as Philip, Duke of Orleans of the Palais Royal, who 
had voted for the death of Louis XVI. More lives were wasted 
by the British generals alone on the opening day of what is 
known as the Somme offensive of July, 19 16, than in the whole 
French revolution from start to finish. We hear so much about 
the martyrs of the French Terror because they were notable, 
well-connected people^ and because there has been a soi-t of prop- 
aganda of their sufferings. But let us balance against them in 
our minds what was going on in the prisons of the world gen- 
erally at that time. In Britain and America, while the Terror 
ruled in France, far more people were slaughtered for of- 
fences — very often quite trivial offences — against property than 
were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason 
against the State. Of course, they were very common people 
indeed, but in their rough way they suffered. A girl was hanged 
in Massachusetts in 1789 for forcibly taking the hat, shoes, 
and buckles of another girl she had met in the street.^ Again, 
Howard the philanthropist (about 1Y73) found a number of 
perfectly innocent people detained in the English prisons who 
had been tried and acquitted, but were unable to pay the gaoler's 
fees. And these prisons were filthy places under no effective 
control. Torture was still in use in the Hanoverian dominions 
of his Britannic majesty King George III. It had been in use 
in France up to the time of the National Assembly. These 
things mark the level cf the age. It is not on record that any- 
one was deliberately tortured by the French revolutionaries 
during the Terror. Those few hundreds of French gentlefolk 
fell into a pit that most of them had been well content should 
exist for others. It was tragic, but not, by the scale of uni- 
versal history, a great tragedy. The common man in France 
was more free, better off, and happier during the "Terror" 
than he had been in 1787. 

The story of the Republic a-fter the summer of 1794 be- 
^ Channing, vol. iii. chap, xviii. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 883 

Gomes a tangled story of jjolitical groups aiming at everything 
from a radical republic to a royalist reaction, but pervaded by 
a general desire for some definite working arrangement eveii 
at the price of considerable concessions. There Avas a series 
of insurrections of the Jacobins and of the royalists, there seems 
to have been what we should call nowadays a hooligan class 
in Paris which was quite ready to turn out to fight and loot on 
either side ; nevertheless the Convention produced a government, 
the Directory of five members, which held France together for 
five years. The last, most threatening revolt of all, in October, 
1795, was suppressed with great skill and decision by a rising 
young general, Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The Directory was victorious abroad, but uncreative at home; 
its members were far too anxious to stick to the sweets and 
glories of office to prepare a constitution that would supersede 
them, and far too dishonest to handle the task of financial and 
economic reconstruction demanded by the condition of France. 
We need only note two of their names, Carnot, who was an 
honest republican, and Barras^ who was conspicuously a rogue. 
Their rei.gn of five years formed a curious interlude in this 
history of great changes. They took things as they found 
them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the 
French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Ger- 
many, and north Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and 
republics set up. But such propagandist zeal as animated 
the Directorate did not prevent the looting of the treasures of 
the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment of 
the French Government. Their wars became less and less 
the holy war of freedom, and more and more like the aggres- 
sive wars of the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand 
Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her tradi- 
tion of foreign policy, grasping, aggressive, restless, French- 
centred. One discovers it still as vigorous under the Directorate 
as if there had been no revolution. 



§ 13 

The ebb of this tide of Revolution in the world, this tide which 
had created the great Republic of America and threatened to 
submerge all European monarchies, was now at hand. It is as if 
something had thrust up from beneath the surface of human 



884 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

affairs, made a gigantic effort, and for a time spent itself. It 
swept many obsolescent and evil things away, but many evil 
and imjnst things remained. It solved many j^roblems, and 
it left the desire for fellowship and ofder face to face with 
mnch vaster problems that it seemed only to have revealed. 
Privilege of certain types had gone, many tyrannies, mnch re- 
ligions persecution. When these things of the ancient regime 
had vanished, it seemed as if they had never mattered. What 
did matter was that for all their votes and enfranchisement, 
and in spite of all their passion and effort, common men were 
still not free and not enjoying an equal happiness; that the 
immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revo- 
lution had come, remained unfulfilled. 

Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly 
everything that had been clearly thought out before it came. 
It was not failing now for want of impetus, but for want of 
finished ideas. Many things that had oppressed mankind were 
swept away for ever. 'Now that they were swept away it be- 
came apparent how unprepared men were for the creative op- 
portunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolu- 
tion are periods of action ; in them men reap the harvests of 
ideas that have gi'own during phases of interlude, and they 
leave the fields cleared for a new season of growth, but they 
cannot suddenly produce ripened new ideas to meet an un- 
anticipated riddle. 

The sweeping away of king and lord, of priest and inquisitor, 
of landlord and taxgatherer and task-master, left the mass of 
men face to face for the first time with certain very fundamental 
aspects of the social structure, relationships they had taken 
for gTanted, and had never realized the need of thinking hard 
and continuously about before. Institutions that had seemed 
to be in the nature of things, and matters that had seemed to 
happen by the same sort of necessity that brought round the 
dawn and springtime, were discovered to be artificial, control- 
lable, were they not so perplexingly intricate, and — now that 
the old routines were abolished and done away with — in urgent 
need of control. The ISTew Order found itself confronted Avith 
three riddles which it was quite unprepared to solve: Prop"- 
erty, Currency, and International Eelationship. 

Let us take these three problems in order, and ask what 
they are and how they arose in human affairs. Every human 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 885 

life is deeply entangled in them, and concerned in their solu- 
tion. The rest of this history becomes more and more clearly 
the development of the effort to solve these problems; that is 
to say, so to interpret property,, so to establish currency, and 
so to control international reactions as to render possible a 
world-wide, progressive, and happy community of will. They 
are the three riddles of the sphinx of fate, to which the human 
commonweal must find an answer or perish. 

The idea of property arises out of the combative instincts of 
the species. Long before men were men, the ancestral ape was 
a proprietor. Primitive property is what a beast will fight 
for. The dog and his bone, the tigress and her lair, the roar- 
ing stag and his herd, these are proprietorship blazing. iSTo 
more nonsensical expression is conceivable in sociology than 
the term "primitive communism." The Old Man of the family 
tribe of early palaeolithic times insisted upon his proprietorship 
in his wives and daughters, in his tools, in his visible universe. 
If any other man wandered into his visible universe he fought 
him, and if he could he slew him. The tribe grew in the course 
of ages, as Atkinson showed convincingly in his Primal Law, 
by the gi-adual toleration by the Old Man of the existence of 
the younger men, and of their proprietorship in the wives they 
captured from outside the tribe, and in the tools and orna- 
ments they made and the game they slew. Human society 
grew by a compromise between this one's property and that. 
It was largely a compromise and an alliance forced upon men 
by the necessity of driving some other tribe out of its visible 
universe. If the hills and forests and streams were not your 
land or my land, it was because they had to be our land. Each 
of us would have preferred to have it my land, but that would 
not work. In that case the other fellows would have destroyed 
us. Society, therefore, is from its beginnings the mitigation 
of ownership. Ownership in the beast and in the primitive 
savage was far more intense a thing than it is in the civilized 
world to-day. It is rooted more strongly in our instincts than 
in our reason. 

In the natural savage and in the untutored man to-day — 
for it is well to keep in mind that no man to-day is more than 
four hundred generations from the primordial savage — there 
is no limitation to the sphere of ownership. Whatever you 
can fight for, you can own; women-folk, spared captive, cap- 



886 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tured beast, forest glade, stone pit or what not. As the com- 
mnnity grew and a sort of law came to restrain internecine 
fighting, men developed rough and ready methods of settling 
proprietorship. Men con Id own what they were the first to 
make or capture or claim. It seemed natural that a debtor 
who could not pay up should become the property of his cred- 
itor. Equally natural was it that, after claiming a patch of 
land ("Bags I," as the schoolboy says), a man should exact 
payments and tribute from anyone else who wanted to use it. 
It was only slowly, as the possibilities of organized life dawned 
on men, that this unlimited property in anything whatever began 
to be recognized as a nuisance. Men found themselves born 
into a universe all owned and claimed, nay! they found them 
selves born owned and claimed. The social struggles of the 
earlier civilization are difficult to trace now, but the history we 
have told of the Eoman republic shows a community waking 
up to the idea that they may become a public inconvenience 
and should then be repudiated, and that the unlimited owner- 
ship of land is also an inconvenience. We find that later Baby- 
lonia severely limited the rights of property in slaves. Finally, 
we find in the teaching of that great revolutionist, Jesus of 
I^Tazareth, such an attack upon property as had never been 
before. Easier it was, he said, for a camel to go through the 
eye of a needle than for the owner of great possessions to 
enter the kingdom of heaven. A steady, continuous criticism 
of the permissible scope of property seems to have been going 
on in the world for the last twenty-five or thirty centuries. 
I^ineteen hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth we find all 
the world that has come under the Christian teaching per- 
suaded that there could be no property in persons. There has 
been a turn-over in the common conscience in that matter. 
And also the idea that "a. man may do what he likes with his 
own" was clearly very much shaken in relation to other sorts 
of property. But this world of the closing eighteenth century 
was still only in the interrogative stage in this matter. It 
had got nothing clear enough, much less settled enough, to act 
upon. One of its primary impulses was to protect property 
against the greed and waste of kings and the exploitation of 
noble adventurers. It was to protect private property that the 
Revolution began. But its equalitarian formulne carried it 
into a criticism of the very property it had risen to protect. 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 887 

How can men be free and equal when numbers of them have 
no ground to stand upon and nothing to eat, and the owners 
will neither feed nor lodge them unless they toil? Exces- 
sively — the poor complained. 

To which riddle the Jacobin reply was to set about '*divid- 
ing up." They wanted to intensify and universalize property. 
Aiming at the same end by another route, there were already 
in the eighteenth century certain primitive socialists — or, to 
be more exact, communists — who wanted to ''abolish" private 
property altogether.. The state (a democratic state was of 
course understood) was to own all property. It was only as 
the nineteenth century developed that men began to realize that 
property was not one simple thing, but a great complex of 
ownerships of different values and consequences, that many 
things (such as human beings, the implements of an artist, 
clothing, tooth-brushes) are very profoundly and incurably 
personal property, and that there is a very great range of 
things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated 
gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be 
considered very particularly to determine how far and under 
what limitations it may come under private ownership, and 
how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered 
and let out by the state in the collective interest. On the prac- 
tical side these questions pass into politics, and the problem 
of making and sustaining efficient state administration. They 
open up issues in social psychology, and interact with the en- 
quiries of educational science. We have to-day the advantage 
of a hundred and thirty years of discussion over the first revo- 
lutionary generation, but even now this criticism of property 
is still a vast and passionate ferment rather than a science. 
Under the circumstances it was impossible that eighteenth- 
century France should present any other spectacle than that of 
vague and confused popular movements seeking to dispossess 
owners, and classes of small and large owners holding on grimly, 
demanding, before everything else, law, order, and security, 
and seeking to increase their individual share of anything what- 
ever that could be legally possessed. 

Closely connected with the vagueness of men's ideas about 
property was the vagueness of their ideas about currency. Both 
the American and the French republics fell into serious trou- 
ble upon this score. Here, again, we deal with something 



888 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

that is not simple, a tangle of usages, conventions, laws, and 
prevalent mental habits, out of which arise problems which 
admit of no solution in simple terms, and which yet are of 
vital importance to the everyday life of the community. The 
validity of the acknowledgment a man is given for a day's 
work is manifestly of quite primary importance to the work- 
ing of the social machine. The gi'owth of confidence in the 
precious metals and of coins, until the assurance became 
practically universal that good money could be trusted to 
have its purchasing power anywhere, must have been 
a gradual one in human history. And being fairly estab- 
lislied, this assurance was subjected to very considerable strains 
and perplexities by the action of governments in debasing cur- 
rency and in substituting paper promises to pay for the actual 
metallic coins. Every age produced a number of clever people 
intelligent enough to realize the opportunities for smart opera- 
tions afforded by the complex of faiths and fictions upon which 
the money system rested, and sufficiently unsound morally to 
give their best energies to growing rich and so getting people 
to work for them, through tricks and tampering with gold, 
coinage, and credit. So soon as serious political and social 
dislocation occurred, the money mechanism began to work stiffly 
and inaccurately. The United States and the French Republic 
both started their careers in a phase of financial difficulty. 
Everywhere governments had been borrowing and issuing paper 
promises to pay interest, more interest than they could con- 
veniently raise. Both revolutions led to much desperate pub- 
lic spending and borrowing, and at the same time to an in- 
terruption of cultivation and production that further dimin- 
ished real taxable wealth. Both governments, being unable 
to pay their way in gold, resorted to the issue of paper money, 
promising to pay upon the security of undeveloped land (in 
America) or recently confiscated church lands (France). In 
both cases the amount of issue went far beyond the confidence 
of men in the new security. Gold was called in, hidden by the 
cunning ones, or went abroad to pay for imports; and people 
found themselves with various sorts of bills and notes in the 
place of coins, all of uncertain and diminishing value. 

However complicated the origins of currency, its practical 
effect and the end it has to serve in the community may be 
stated roughly in simple terras. The money a man receives for 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 889 

his work (mental or bodilj) or for relinquishing his property 
in some consumable good, must ultimately be able to purchase 
for him for his use a fairly equivalent amount of consumable 
goods. ("Consumable goods" is a phrase we would have under- 
stood in the widest sense to represent even such things as a 
journey, a lecture or theatrical entertainment, housing, medical 
advice, and so forth.) When everyone in a community is as- 
sured of this, and assured that the money will not deteriorate 
in purchasing power, then currency — and the distribution of 
goods by trade — is in a healthy and satisfactory state. Then 
men will work cheerfully, and only then. The imperative 
need for that steadfastness and security of currency is the fixed 
datum from which the scientific study and control of currency 
must begin. But under the most stable conditions there will 
always be fluctuations in currency value. The sum total of 
saleable consumable goods in the world and in various coun- 
tries varies from year to year and from season to season ; autumn 
is probably a time of plenty in comparison with spring; with 
an increase in the available goods in the world, the purchasing 
power of currency will increase, unless there is also an increase 
in the amount of currency. On the other hand, if there is a 
diminution in the production of consumable goods or a great and 
unprofitable destruction of consumable goods, such as occurs 
in a war, the share of the total of consumable goods repre- 
sented by a sum of money will diminish and prices and wages 
will rise. In modern war the explosion of a single big shell, 
even if it hits nothing, destroys labour and material roughly 
equivalent to a comfortable cottage or a year's holiday for a 
man. If the shell hits anything, then that further destruction 
has to be added to the diminution of consumable goods. Every 
shell that burst in the recent war diminished by a little fraction 
the purchasing value of every coin in the whole world. If 
there is also an increase of currency during a period when con- 
sumable goods are being used up and not fully replaced — and 
the necessities of revolutionary and war-making governments 
almost always require this — then the enhancement of prices 
and the fall in the value of the currency paid in wages is still 
greater. Usually also governments under these stresses borrow 
money; that is to say, they issue interest-bearing paper, se- 
cured on the willingness and ability of the general community 
to endure taxation. Such operations would be difficult enough 



890 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

if they were carried out frankly by perfectly honest men, in 
the full light of jHiblicity and scientific knowledge. But hith- 
erto this has never been the case; at every point the clever 
egotist, the bad sort of rich man, is trying to deflect things a 
little to his own advantage. Everywhere, too, one finds the 
stnpid egotist ready to take fright and break into panic. Con- 
sequently we presently discover the state encumbered by an 
excess of currency, which is in effect a non-interest-paying 
debt, and also with a great burthen of interest upon loans. 
Both credit and currency begin to fluctuate wildly with 
the evaporation of paiblic confidence. They are, we say, 
demoralized. 

The ultimate consequence of an entirely demoralized currency 
would be to end all work and all trade that could not be carried 
on by payment in kind and barter. Men would refuse to 
work except for food, clothing, housing, and payment in kind. 
The immediate consequence of a partially demoralized cur- 
rency is to drive up prices and make trading feverishly adven- 
turous and workers suspicious and irritable. A sharp man 
wants under such conditions to hold money for as brief a 
period as possible ; he demands the utmost for his reality, and 
buys a reality again as soon as possible in order to get this per- 
ishable stuff, the currency paper, off his hands. All who have 
fixed incomes and saved accumulations suffer by the rise in 
prices, and the wage-earners find, with a gathering fury, that 
the real value of their wages is continually less. Here is a 
state of affairs where the duty of every clever person is evi- 
dently to help adjust and reassure. But all the traditions 
of private enterprise, all the ideas of the later eighteenth cen- 
tury, went to justify the action of acute-minded and dex- 
terous people who set themselves to accumulate claims, titles, 
and tangible property in the storms and dislocations of this 
currency breakdown. The number of understanding people 
in the world who were setting themselves sincerely and simply 
to restore honest and workable currency and credit conditions 
were few and ineffectual. Most of the financial and specu- 
lative people of the time were playing the part of Cornish 
wreckers — not apparently with any conscious dishonesty, but 
with the completest self-approval and the applause of their 
fellow-men. The aim of every clever person was to accumulate 
as much as he could of really negotiable wealth, and then, 



REPUBLICS OF AMERICA AND FRANCE 891 

and only then, to bring about some sort of stabilizing political 
process that would leave him in advantageous possession of 
his accumulation. Here were the factors of a bad economic 
atmosphere, suspicious, feverish, greedy, and speculative. . . . 

In the third direction in which the Revolution had been 
unprepared with clear ideas, the problem of international re- 
lationships, developments were to occur that interacted dis- 
astrously with this state of financial and economic adventure, 
this scramble and confusion, this preoccupation of men's minds 
with the perplexing slipperiness of their private property and 
their monetary position at home. The Republic at its birth 
found itself at war. For a time that war was waged by the 
new levies with a patriotism and a zeal unparalleled in the 
world's history. But that could not go on. The Directory found 
itself at the head of a conquering country, intolerably needy 
and embarrassed at home, and in occupation of rich foreign 
lands, full of seizable wealth and material and financial op- 
portunity. We have all double natures, and the French in 
particular seem to be developed logically and symmetrically 
on both sides. Into these conquered regions France came as a 
liberator, the teacher of Republicanism to mankind. Holland 
and Belgium became the Batavian Republic, Genoa and its 
Riviera the Ligurian Republic, north Italy the Cisalpine Re- 
public, Switzerland was rechristened the Helvetian Republic, 
Miilhausen, Rome, and Naples vjere designated republics. 
Grouped about France, these republics were to be a constellation 
of freedom leading the world. That was the ideal side. At 
the same time the French government, and French private 
individuals in concert with the government, proceeded to a 
complete and exhaustive exploitation of the resources of these 
liberated lands. 

So within ten years of the meeting of the States General, 
N'ew France begins to take on a singular likeness to the old. 
It is more flushed, more vigorous ; it wears a cap of liberty in- 
stead of a crown ; it has a new army — but a damaged fleet ; it 
has new rich people instead of the old rich people, a new peas- 
antry working even harder than the old and yielding more taxes, 
a new foreign policy curiously like the old foreig-n policy 
disrobed, and — there is no Millennium. 



XXXVII 

THE CAREER OF Is^APOLEON BONAPARTE 

§ 1. The Bonaparte Family in Corsica. § 2. Bonaparte as 
a Republican General. § 3. Napoleon First Consul, 1799- 
1804. § 4. Napoleon I. Emperor, 180J^-U. § 5- The Hun- 
dred Days. § 6. The Map of Europe in 1815. 

§ 1 

AND now we come to one of the most illuminating figures 
in modern history, the figure of an adventurer and a 
wrecker, whose story seems to display with an extraor- 
dinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of egotism, van- 
ity, and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the com- 
mon good. Against this background of confusion and stress 
and hope, this strained and heaving France and Europe, this 
stormy and tremendous dawn, appears this dark little archaic 
personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and 
neatly vulgar. He was born (1709) in the still half-barbaric 
island of Corsica, the son of a rather prosaic father, a lawyer 
who had been first a patriotic Corsican against the French 
monarchy which was trying to subjugate Corsica, and who had 
then gone over to the side of the invader. His mother was 
of sturdier stufi:", passionately patriotic and a strong and man- 
aging woman. (She birched her sons; on one occasion she 
birched Napoleon when he was sixteen.) There were numerous 
brothers and sisters, and the family pursued the French author- 
ities with importunities for rewards and jobs. Except for 
Napoleon it seems to have been a thoroughly commonplace, 
''hungry" family. He was clever, bad-tempered, and overbear- 
ing. From his mother he had acquired a romantic Corsican 
patriotism. 

Through the patronage of the French governor of Corsica 
he got an education first at the military school of Brienne and 
then at the military school of Paris, from which he passed 

892 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 893 

into the artillery in 1785. He was an industrious student 
both of mathematics and history, his memory was prodigiously 
good, and he made copious note-books which still exist. These 
note-books show no very exceptional intelligence, and they con- 
tain short pieces of original composition — upon suicide and 
similar adolescent topics. He fell early under the spell of 
Rousseau ; he developed sensibility and a scorn for the corrup- 
tions of civilization. In 1786 he wrote a pamphlet against a 
Swiss pastor who had attacked Eousseau. It was a very ordi- 
nary adolescent production, rhetorical and imitative. He 
dreamt of an independent Corsica, freed from the French. 
With the revolution, he became an ardent republican and a 
supporter of the new French regime in Corsica. For some 
years, until the fall of Robespierre, he remained a Jacobin. 



He soon gained the reputation of a useful aRtI capable officer, 
and it was through Robespierre's younger brother that he got 
his first chance of distinction at Toulon. Toulon had been 
handed over to the British and Spanish by the Royalists, and 
an allied fleet occupied its harbour, Bonaparte was given the 
command »f the artillery, and under his direction the French 
forced the allies to abandon the port and town. 

He was next appointed commander of the artillery in Italy, 
but he had not taken up his duties when the death of Robespierre 
seemed likely to involve his own; he was put u)ider arrest as 
a Jacobin, and for a time he was in danger of the guillotine. 
That danger passed. He was employed as artillery commander 
in an abortive raid upon Corsica, and then went to Paris (1795) 
rather down at heel. Madame Junot in her Memoirs describes 
his lean face and slovenly appearance at this time, "his ill- 
combed, ill-powdered hair hanging down over his grey over- 
coat," his gloveless hands and badly blacked boots. It was a 
time of exhaustion and reaction after the severities of the 
Jacobite republic. "In Paris," says Holland Rose, "the star 
of Liberty was paling before Mercury, Mars, and Venus" 
— finance, uniforms, and social charm. The best of the common 
men were in the armies, away beyond the frontiers. We have 
already noted the last rising of the royalists in this year (1795). 
iNapoleon had the luck to be in Paris, and found his second 



894 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

opportunity in this affair. He saved the Kepublic — of the 
Directory. 

His abilities greatly impressed Carnot, the most upright of 
the Directors. Moreover, he married a charming young widow, 
Madame Josephine de Beauharnais, who had great influence 
with Barras, Both these things pi'obably helped him to secure 
the command in Italy. 

We have no space here for the story of his brilliant campaigns 
in Italy (1796-97), but of the spirit in which that invasion of 
Italy was conducted we must say a word or two, because it 
illustrates so vividly the double soul of France and of Napoleon, 
and how revolutionary idealism was paling before practical 
urgencies. He proclaimed to the Italians that the French were 
coming to break their chains — and they were! He wrote to 
the Directory: "We will levy 20,000,000 francs in exactions 
in this country ; it is one of the richest in the world." To his 
soldiers he said, "You are famished and nearly naked. . . . 
I lead you into the most fertile plain in the world. There you 
will find great towns, rich provinces, honour, glory, riches. . . ." 

We are all such mixed stuff as this ; in all of us the intimations 
of a new world and a finer duty struggle to veil and control the 
ancient greeds and lusts of our inherited past ; but these pas- 
sag'es, written by a young man hi twenty-seven, seem to show 
the gilt of honourable idealism rubbed off at an unusually early 
age. These are the bribes of an adventurer who has brought 
whatever impulse of devotion to a great cause once stirred 
within him well under the control of his self-love. 

His successes in Italy were brilliant and complete; they 
enormously stimulated his self-confidence and his contempt for 
the energy and ability of his fellow-creatures. He had wanted 
to go into Italy because there lay the most attractive task — 
he had risked his position in the army by refusing to take up 
the irksome duties of a command against the rebels in La 
Vendee — and there are clear signs of a vast expansion of his 
vanity with his victories. He had been a great reader of 
Plutarch's Lives and of Roman history, and his extremely ac- 
tive but totally uncreative imagination was now busy with 
dreams of a revival of the eastern conquests of the Roman 
Empire. He got the republic of Venice out of his way by cut- 
ting it up between the French and Austria, securing the Ionian 
islands and the Venetian fleet for France. This peace, the peace 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 895 

of Campo Formio, was for both sides r. thoroughly scoun- 
drelly and ultimately a disastrous bargain. The now republic 
of France assisted in the murder of an ancient repuvilic— Na- 
poleon carried his point against a considerable outcry in France 
— and Austria got Venetia, in which land in 1918 she was 
destined to bleed to death. There were also secret clauses by 
which both France and Austria were later to acquire south 
German territory. And it wacj uot only the Roman push east- 
ward that was now exciting Napoleon's brain. This was the 
land of Caesar — and Ca?sar was a bad example for the suc- 
cessful general of a not very stable republic. 

Cciesar had come back to Rome from Gaul a hero and con- 
queror. His new imitator would come back from Egypt and 
India — Egypt and India were to be his Gaul. There was really 
none of the genius about which historians write so glibly in 
this decision. It was a tawdry and ill-conceived imitation. 
The elements of failure stared him in the face. The way to 
Egypt and India was by sea, and the British, in spite of two 
recent naval mutinies, whose importance Napoleon exaggerated, 
were stronger than the French at sea. Moreover, Egypt was 
a part of the Turkish empire, by no means a contemptible power 
in those days. Nevertheless he persuaded the Directory, which 
was dazzled by his Italian exploits, to let him go. An Armada 
started from Toulon in May, 1798, captured Malta, and had the 
good luck to evade the British fleet and arrive at Alexandria. 
He landed his troops hurriedly, and the battle of the Pyramids 
made him master of Egypt. 

The main British fleet at that time was in the Atlantic out- 
side Cadiz, but the admiral had detached a force of his best 
ships, under Vice-Admiral Nelson — as great a genius in naval 
affairs as was Napoleon in things military — to chase and en- 
gage the French flotilla. For a time Nelson sought the French 
fleet in vain ; finally, on the evening of the first of Augiist, he 
found it at anchor in Aboukir bay. He had caught it una- 
wares ; many of the men were ashore and a council was being 
held in the flag-ship. He had no charts, and it was a hazardous 
thing to sail into the shallow water in a bad light. The 
French admiral concluded, therefore, that his adversary would 
not attack before morning, and so made no haste in recalling 
his men aboard until it was too late to do so. Nelson, however, 
struck at once — against the advice of some of his captains. 



896 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

One ship only went agToimd. She marked the shoal for the 
rest of the fleet. He sailed to the attack in a double line 
about sundown, putting the French between two fires. Night 
fell as the battle was joined; the fight thundered and crashed 
in the darkness, until it was lit presently by the flames of 
burning French ships, and then by the flare of the French 
flag-ship, the Orient, blowing up. . . . Before midnight the 
battle of the Nile was over, and Napoleon's fleet was destroyed. 
Napoleon was cut off from France. 

Says Holland Rose, quoting Thiers, this Egyptian expedi- 
tion was '^the rashest attempt history records." Napoleon was 
left in Egypt with the Turks g^athering; against him and his 
army infected with the plague. Nevertheless, with a stupid sort 
of persistence, he went on for a time with this Eastern scheme. 
He gained a victory at Jaffa, and, being short of provisions, 
massacred all his prisoners. Then he tried to take Acre, where 
his own siege artillery, just captured at sea by the English, 
was used against him. Eeturning baffled to Egypt, he gained 
a brilliant victory over a Turkish force at Aboukir, and then, 
deserting the army of Egypt — it held on until 1801, when it 
capitulated to a British force — made his escape back to France 
(1799), narrowly missing capture by a British cruiser off Sicily. 

Here was muddle and failure enough to discredit any gen- 
eral — had it been known. But the very British cruisers which 
came so near to catching him, helped him by preventing any 
real understanding of the Egyptian situation from reaching 
the French people. He could make a great flourish over the 
battle O'f Aboukir and conceal the shame and loss of Acre. 
Things were not going well with France just then. There had 
been military failures at several points ; much of Italy had 
been lost, Bonaparte's Italy, and this turned men's minds to 
him as the natural saviour of that situation ; moreover, there 
had been much peculation, and some of it was coming to light ; 
France was in one of her phases of financial scandal, and Na- 
poleon had not filched; the public was in that state of moral 
fatigue when a strong and honest man is called for, a wonder- 
ful, impossible healing man who will do everything for every- 
body. People, poor lazy souls, persuaded themselves that this 
specious young man with the hard face, so providentially back 
from Egypt, was the strong and honest man required — another 
Washington. 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 



897 



With Julius Caesar rather than Washington at the back of 
his mind, Napoleon responded to the demand of his time. A 
conspiracy was carefully engineered to replace the Directory 
by three "Consuls" — everybody seems to have been reading far 
too much Roman history just then — of whom Napoleon was 
to be the chief. The working of that conspiracy is too intricate 
a story for our space ; it involved a Cromwell-like dispersal of 
the Lower House (the Council of Five Hundred), and in this 




Map -to Ulxxstraix. 

CA?^TPAIG-1M 



affair Napoleon lost his nerve. The deputies shouted at him 
and hustled him, and he seems to have been very much fright- 
ened. He nearly fainted, stuttered, and could say nothing, but 
the situation was saved by his brother Lucien, who brought in 
the soldiers and dispersed the council. This little hitch did not 
affect the final success of the scheme. The three Consuls were 
installed at the Luxembourg palace, with two commissioners, 
to reconstruct the constitution. 

With all his confidence restored and sure of the support of 
the people, who supposed him to be honest, patriotic, repub- 
lican, and able to bring about a good peace, Napoleon took a 
high hand with his colleagues and the commissioners. A con- 
stitution was produced in which the chief executive officer 
was to be called the First Consul, with enormous powers. 
He was to be Napoleon ; this was part of the constitution. He 
was to be re-elected or replaced at the end of ten years. He was 



898 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to be assisted by a Council of State, appointed by himself, 
which was to initiate legislation and send its proposals to two 
bodies, the Legislative Body (which could vote, but not dis- 
cuss) and the Tribunate (which could discuss, but not vote), 
which were selected by an appointed Senate from a special 
class, the "notabilities of France," who were elected by the 
"notabilities of the departments," who were elected by the "nota- 
bilities of the commune," who were elected by the common 
voters. The suffrage for the election of the notabilities of the 
commune was universal. This was the sole vestige of democ- 
racy in the astounding pyramid. This constitution was chiefly 
the joint production of a worthy philosopher, Sieyes, who was 
one of the three consuls; and Bonaparte. But so weary was 
France with her troubles and efforts, and so confident were men 
in the virtue and ability of this adventurer from Corsica, that 
when, at the birth of the nineteenth century, this constitution 
was submitted to the country, it was carried by 3,011,007 votes 
to 1,562. France put herself absolutely in Bonaparte's hands, 
and prepared to be peaceful, happy, and glorious. 



I*^ow surely here was opportunity such as never came to man 
before. Here was a position in which a man might well bow 
himself in fear of himself, and search his heart and serve God 
and man to the utmost. The old order of things was dead or 
dying ; strange new forces drove through the world seeking- form 
and direction ; the promise of a world republic and an enduring 
world peace whispered in a multitude of startled minds. Had 
this man any profundity of vision, any power of creative imagi- 
nation, had he been accessible to any disinterested ambition, 
he might have done work for mankind that would' have made 
him the very sun of history. All Europe and America, stirred 
by the first promise of a new age, was waiting for him. l^ot 
France alone. France was in his hand, his instrument, to do 
with as he pleased, willing for peace, but tempered for war like 
an exquisite sword. There lacked nothing to this great occa- 
sion but a noble imagination. And failing that, Napoleon 
could do no more than strut upon the crest of this great moun- 
tain of opportunity like a cockerel on a dunghill. The figure 
he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 899 

vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and disregard 
of all who trusted him, and of a grandiose aping of Csesar, 
Alexander, and Charlemagne which w^ould be purely comic if 
it were not caked over with human blood. Until, as Victor 
Hugo said in his tremendous way, "God was bored by him," 
and he was kicked aside into a corner to end his days, explain- 
ing and explaining how very clever his worst blunders had been, 
prowling about his dismal hot island shooting birds and squab- 
bling meanly with an underbred gaoler who failed to show him 
proper "respect." 

His career as First Consul was perhaps the least dishonour- 
able phase in his career. He took the crumbling military affairs 
of the Directory in hand, and after a complicated campaign in 
North Italy brought matters to a head in the victory of Marengo, 
near Alessandria (1800). It was a victory that at some mo- 
ments came very near disaster. In the December of the same 
year General ]\Icreau, in the midst of snow, mud, and altogether 
abominable weather, inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the 
Austrian army at Hohenlinden. If Napoleon had gained this 
battle, it would have counted among his most characteristic and 
brilliant exploits. These things made the hoped-for peace possi- 
ble. In 1801 the preliminaries of peace with England and 
Austria were signed. Peace with England, the Treaty of 
Amiens, was concluded in 1802, and Napoleon was free to give 
himself to the creative statecraft of which France, and Europe 
through France, stood in need. The war had given the country 
extended boundaries, the treaty with England restored the 
colonial empire of France and left her in a position of security 
beyond the utmost dreams of Louis XIV, It was o])en to 
Napoleon to work out and consolidate the new order of things, 
to make a modern state that should become a beacon and in- 
spiration to Europe and all the world. 

He attempted nothing of the sort. He did not realize that 
there were such things as modern states in the scheme of possi- 
bility. His little imitative imagination was full of a deep cun- 
ning dream of being Csesar over again — as if this universe 
would ever tolerate anything of that sort over again ! He was 
scheming to make himself a real emperor, with a crown upon 
his head and all his rivals and school-fellows and friends at 
his feet. This could give him no fresh power that he did not 
already exercise, but it would be more splendid — it would 



900 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

astonish his mother. What response was there in a head of 
that sort for the splendid creative challenge of the time ? But 
first France must be prosperous. France hungry would cer- 
tainly not endure an emperor. He set himself to carry out an 
old scheme of roads that Louis XV had approved ; he developed 
canals in imitation of the English canals; he reorg-anized the 
police and made the country safe ; and, preparing the scene for 
his personal drama, he set himself to make Paris look like Rome, 
with classical arches, with classical columns. Admirable 
schemes for banking development were available, and he made 
use of them. In all these things he moved with the times, they 
would have happened — with less autocracy, with less centraliza- 
tion, if he had never been born. And he set himself to weaken 
the republicans whose fundamental convictions he was planning 
to outrage. He recalled the emigres, provided they gave satis- 
factory assurances to respect the new regime. Many were very 
willing to come back on such terms, and let Bourbons be by- 
gones. And he worked out a great reconciliation, a Concordat, 
with Rome. Rome was to support him, and he was to restore 
the authority of Rome in the parishes. France would never 
be obedient and manageable, he thought ; she would never stand 
a new monarchy, without religion. ''How can you have order 
in a state," he said, "without religion ? Society cannot exist 
without inequality of fortunes, which cannot endure apart from 
religion. When one man is dying of hunger near another who 
is ill of surfeit, he cannot resigii himself to this difference, un- 
less there is an authority which declares — 'God wills it thus: 
there must be poor and rich in the world : but hereafter and 
during all eternity the division of things will take place dif- 
ferently.' " Religion — especially of the later Roman brand — 
was, he thought, excellent stuff for keeping the common people 
quiet. In his early Jacobin days he had denounced it for that 
very reason. 

Another great achievement which marks his imaginative 
scope and his estimate of human nature was the institution of 
the Legion of Honour, a scheme for decorating Frenchmen 
with bits of ribbon which was admirably calculated to divert 
ambitious men from subversive proceedings. 

And also N^apoleon interested himself in Christian propa- 
ganda. Here is the Napoleonic view of the political uses of 
Christ, a view that has tainted all French missions from that 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 901 

time forth. "It is mj wish to re-establish the institution for 
foreign missions ; for the religious missionaries may be very 
useful to me in Asia, Africa, and America, as I shall make 
them reconnoitre all the lands they visit. The sanctity of their 
dress will not only protect them, but serve to conceal their po- 
litical and commercial investigations. The head of the mis- 
sionary establishment shall reside no longer at Rome, but in 
Paris." 

These are the ideas of a roguish merchant rather than a 
statesman. His treatment of education shows the same nar- 
row vision, the same blindness to the realities of the dawn about 
him. Elementary education he neglected almost completely ; 
he left it to the conscience of the local authorities, and he pro- 
vided that the teachers should be paid out of the fees of the 
scholars ; it is clear he did not want the common people to be 
educated ; he had no glimmxcring of any understanding why they 
should be; but he interested himself in the provision of tech- 
nical and higher schools because his state needed the services 
of clever, self-seeking, well-informed men. This was an astound- 
ing retrogression from the great scheme, drafted by Condorcet 
for the Republic in 1Y92, for a complete system of free educa- 
tion for the entire nation. Slowly but steadfastly the project 
of Condorcet comes true; the great nations of the world are 
being compelled to bring it nearer and nearer to realization, 
and the cheap devices of ISTapoleon pass out of our interest. As 
for the education of the mothers and wives of our race, this 
was the quality of ISTapoleon's wisdom: ''I do not think that 
we need trouble ourselves with any plan of instruction for 
young females, they cannot be better brought up than by their 
mothers. Public education is not suitable for them, because 
they are never called upon to act in public. Manners are all 
in all to them, and marriage is all they look to." 

The First Consul was no kinder to women in the Code l^apo- 
leon. A wife, for example, had no control over her own prop- 
erty; she was in her husband's hands. This code was the work 
very largely of the Council of State. !Napoleon seems rather 
to have hindered than helped its deliberations. He would in- 
vade the session without notice, and favour its members with 
lengthy and egotistical monologues, frequently quite irrelevant 
to the matter in hand. The Council listened with profound 
respect ; it was all the Council could do. He would keep his 



902 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

councillors up to unearthly hours, and betray a simple pride 
in his superior wakefulness. He recalled these discussions with 
peculiar satisfaction in his later years, and remarked on one 
occasion that his glory consisted not in having won forty battles, 
but in having created the Code Napoleon. ... So far as it 
substituted plain statements for inaccessible legal mysteries his 
Code was a good thing ; it gathered together, revised, and made 
clear a vast disorderly accumulation of laws, old and new. Like 
all his constructive work, it made for immediate efficiency, it 
defined things and relations so that men could get to work upon 
them without further discussion. It was of less immediate 
practical importance that it frequently defined them wrongly. 
There was no intellectual power, as distinguished from intel- 
lectual energy, behind this codification. It took everything 
that existed for granted. (*'Sa Majeste ne croit que ce qui 
est." ^) The fundamental ideas of the civilized community 
and of the terms of human co-operation were in process of re- 
construction all about Napoleon — and he never perceived it. 
He accepted a phase of change, and tried to fix it for ever. To 
this day France is cramped by this early nineteenth-century 
strait-waistcoat into which he clapped her. He fixed the status 
of women, the status of labourers, the status of the peasant ; 
they all struggle to this day in the net of his hard definitions. 

So briskly and forcibly Napoleon set his mind, hard, clear, 
and narrow, to brace up France. That bracing up was only a 
part of the largo egotistical schemes that dominated him. His 
imagination was set upon a new Ca?sarism. In 1802 he got 
himself made First Consul for life with the power of appoint- 
ing a successor, and his clear intention of annexing Holland 
and Italy, in spite of his treaty obligations to keep them sepa- 
rate, made the Peace of Amiens totter crazily from the very 
beginning. Since his schemes were bound to provoke a war 
with England, ho should, at any cost, have kept quiet until he 
had brought his navy to a superiority over the British navy. 
He had the control of great resources for ship-building, the 
British government was a weak one, and three or four years 
would have sufficed to shift that balance. But in spite of his 
rough experiences in Egypt, he had never mastered the im- 
portance of sea power, and he had not the mental steadfastness 
for a waiting game and long preparation. In 1803 his occupa- 
^Gourgaud quoted by Holland Rose. 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 903 

tion of Switzerland precipitated a crisis, and war broke out 
again with England. The weak Addington in England gave 
place to tlie greater Pitt. The rest of Napoleon's story turns 
upon that war. 

During the period of the Consulate, the First Consul was 
very active in advancing the fortunes of his brothers and sisters. 
This was quite human, very clannish and Corsican, and it helps 
us to understand just how ho valued his position and the oppor- 
tunities before him. Few of us can live without an audience, 
and the first audience of our childhood is our family; most of 
us to the end of our days are swayed by the desire to impress 
our parents and brothers and sisters. Few "letters home" of 
successful men or women display the graces of modesty and 
self-forgetfulness. Only souls uplifted, as the soul of Jesus of 
Nazareth was uplifted, can say of all the world, "Behold my 
mother and my brethren !" A large factor in the making of 
Napoleon was the desire to amaze, astonish, and subdue the 
minds of the Bonaparte family, and their neighljours. He 
promoted his brothers ridiculously — for they wove the most or- 
dinary of men. The hungry Bonapartes were in luck. Surely 
all Corsica was open-mouthed ! But one person who knew 
him well was neither amazed nor subdued. This was his mother. 
He sent her money to spend and astonish the neighbours; he 
exhorted her to make a display, to live as became the mother 
of so marvellous, so world-shaking, a son. But the good lady, 
who had birched the Ifan of Destiny at the age of sixteen for 
grimacing at his grandmother, was neither dazzled nor deceived 
by him at the age of thirty-two. All France might worship 
him, but she had no illusions. She put by the money he sent 
her ; she continued her customary economies. "When it is all 
over," she said, "you will be glad of my savings." 

§ 4 

We will not detail the steps by which Napoleon became 
Emperor. His coronation was the most extraordinary revival 
of stale history that it is possible to imagine. Ca?sar was no 
longer the model ; Napoleon was playing now at being Charle- 
magne. Ho was crowned emperor, not indeed at Rome, but in 
the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris; the Pope (Pius VII) 
had been brought from Rome to perform the ceremony ; and at 



904 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



the climax Napoleon I seized the crown, waved the Pope aside, 
and crowned himself. The attentive reader of this Outline 
will know that a thousand years before this would have had 
considerable significance; in 1804 it was just a ridiculous scene. 
In 180G Napoleon revived another venerable antiquity, and, 
following still the footsteps of Charlemagne, crowned himself 
with the iron crown of Lombardy in the cathedral of Milan. 
All this mummery was to have a wonderful effect upon the 

imagination of western Ger- 
many, which was to remem- 
ber that it, toO', had been a 
part of the empire of Charle- 
magne. 

The four daughter repub- 
lics of France were now to 
become kingdoms; in 1806 
he set up brother Louis in 
Holland and brother Joseph 
in Naples. But the story of 
the subordinate kingdoms he 
created in Europe, helpful 
though this free handling of 
frontiers was towards the 
subsequent unification of 
Italy and Germany, is too complex and evanescent for this 
Outline. 

The pact between the new Charlemagne and the new Leo 
did not hold good for very long. In 1807 he began to bully the 
Pope, and in 1811 he made him a close prisoner at Fontaine- 
bleau. There does not seem to have been much reason in these 
proceedings. They estranged all Catholic opinion, as his coro- 
nation had estranged all liberal opinion. He ceased to stand 
either for the old or the new. The new he had betrayed; the 
old he had failed to win. He stood at last for nothing but 
himself. 

There seems to have been as little reason in the foreign policy 
that now plunged Europe into a fresh cycle of wars. Having 
quarrelled with Great Britain too soon, he (1804) assembled 
a vast army at Boulogne for the conquest of England, regard- 
less of the naval situation. He even struck a medal and erected 
a column at Boulogne to commemorate the triumph of this 




'!Ma:polc<nv SLS Etnpcror 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 905 

projected invasion. In some "Napoleonic" fashion the British 
fleet was to be decoyed away, this army of Bonlogne was to be 
smuggled across the Channel on a flotilla of rafts and boats, 
and London was to be captured before the fleet returned. At 
the same time his aggressions in south Germany forced Austria 
and Russia steadily into a coalition with Britain against him. 
In 1805 two fatal blows were struck at any hope he may have 
entertained of ultimate victory, by the British .Admirals Calder 
and Kelson. In July the former inflicted a serious reverse upon 
the French fleet in the Bay of Biscay; in October the latter 
destroyed the joint fleets of France and Spain at the battle of 
Trafalgar. IsTelson died splendidly upon the Victory, victori- 
ous. Thereafter Napoleon was left with Britain in pitiless 
opposition, unattainable and unconquerable, able to strike here 
or there against him along all the coasts of Europe. 

But for awhile the mortal wound of Trafalgar was hidden 
from the French mind altogether. They heard merely that 
"storms have caused us to lose some ships of the line after an 
imprudent fight." After Calder's victory he had snatched his 
army from Boulogne, rushed it across half Europe, and de- 
feated the Austrian and Russian armies at Ulm and Austerlitz. 
Under these inauspicious circumstances Prussia came into the 
war against him, and was utterly defeated and broken at the 
battle of Jena (180G). Although Austria and Prussia were 
broken, Russia was still a fighting power, and the next year was 
devoted to this unnecessary antagonist of the French, against 
whom an abler and saner ruler would never have fought at all. 
We cannot trace in any detail the difficulties of the Polish cam- 
paign against Russia ; Napoleon was roughly handled at Pultusk 
— which he announced in Paris as a brilliant victory — and 
again at Eylau. Then the Russians were defeated at Fried- 
land (1807). As yet he had never touched Russian soil, the 
Russians were still as unbeaten as the British ; but now came 
an extraordinary piece of good fortune for Napoleon. By a 
mixture of boasting, subtlety, and flattery he won over the young 
and ambitious Tsar, Alexander I — he was just thirty years old 
— ^to an alliance. The two emperors met on a raft in the middle 
of the Niemen at Tilsit, and there came to an understanding. 

This meeting was an occasion for sublime foolishness on the 
part of both the principal actors. Alexander had imbibed much 
liberalism during his education at the court of Catherine II, 



906 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



and was all for freedom, education, and the new order of the 
world — subject to his own pre-eminence. ''He would gladly 
have everyone free," said one of his early associates, "provided 
that everyone was prepared to do freely exactly what he 
wished." And he declared that he would have abolished serf- 
dom if it had cost him his head — if only civilization had been 
more advanced. He made war against France, he said, be- 
cause N'apoleon was a tyrant, to free the French people. After 

Friedland he saw I^apoleon 
in a different light. These 
two men met eleven days 
after that rout ; Alexander 
no doubt in the state of ex- 
planatory exaltation natural 
to his type during a mood of 
change. 

To Kapoleon the meeting 
must have been extremely 
gratifying. This was his 
first meeting with an em- 
peror upon terms of equality. 
Like all men of limited 
vision, this man was a snob 
to the bone, his continual 
solicitude for his titles shows as much, and here was a real 
emperor, a born emperor, taking his three-year-old dignities as 
equivalent to the authentic imperialism of Moscow. Two 
imaginations soared together upon the raft at Tilsit. "What 
is Europe?" said Alexander. ''We are Europe." They dis- 
cussed the affairs of Prussia and Austria in that spirit, they 
divided Turkey in anticipation, they arranged for the conquest 
of India, and indeed of most of Asia, and that Russia should 
take Finland from the Swedes; and they disregarded the dis- 
agi'eeable fact that the greater part of the world's surface is sea, 
and that on the seas the British fleets sailed now unchallenged. 
Close at hand was Poland, ready to rise up and become the pas^ 
sionate ally of France had I^apoleon but willed it so. But he was 
blind to Poland. It was a day of visions without vision. 
I^apoleon even then, it seems, concealed the daring thought that 
he might one day marry a Russian princess, a real princess. But 
that, he was to learn in 1810, was going a little too far. 




CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 907 

After Tilsit there was a perceptible deterioration iu ISTapo- 
leon's quality ; lie became rasher, less patient of obstacles, more 
and more the fated master of the world, more and more intoler- 
able to everyone he encountered. 

In 1808 he committed a very serious blunder. Spain was 
his abject ally, completely under his control, but he saw fit 
to depose its Bourbon king in order to promote his brother 
Joseph from the crown of the two Sicilies. Portugal he had 
already conquered, and the two kingdoms of Spain and Portugal 
were to be united. Thereupon the Spanish arose in a state of 
patriotic fury, surrounded a French army at Baylen, and com- 
pelled it to surrender. It was an astonishing break in the 
French career of victory. 

The British were not slow to seize the foothold this insur- 
rection gave tliem. A British army under Sir Arthur Welles- 
ley (afterwards the Duke of Wellington) landed in Portugal, 
defeated the French at Vimiero, and compelled them to retire 
into Spain. The news of these reverses caused a very great ex- 
citement in Germany and Austria, and the Tsar assumed a more 
arrogant attitude towards his ally. 

There was another meeting of these two potentates at Erfurt, 
in which the Tsar was manifestly less amenable to tlie dazzling 
tactics of Napoleon than he had been. Followed four years 
of unstable "ascendancy" for France, while the outlines on the 
map of Europe waved about like garments on a clothesline on 
a windy day. N^apoleon's personal empire gi'ew by frank an- 
nexations to include Holland, much of western Germany, much 
of Italy, and much of the eastern Adriatic coast. But one by 
one the French colonies were falling to the British, and the 
British armies in the Spanish peninsula, with the Spanish 
auxiliaries, slowly pressed the French northward. All Europe 
was getting very weary of IN^apoleon and very indignant with 
him ; his antagonists now were no longer merely monarchs and 
ministers, but whole peoples also. The Prussians, after the dis- 
aster of Jena in 1806, had set to work to put their house in 
order. Under the leadership of Freiherr von Stein they had 
swept aside their feudalism, abolished privilege and serfdom, 
organized popular education and popular patriotism, accom- 
plished, in fact, without any internal struggle nearly everything 
that France had achieved in 1789. By 1810 a new Prussia 
existed, the nucleus of a new Germany. And now Alexander, 



908 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



inspired it would seem by dreams of world ascendancy even 
crazier than liis rival's, was posing again as tlie friend of lib- 
erty. In 1810 fresh friction was created by Alexander's ob- 
jection to ISTapoleon's matrimonial ambitions. For he was now 
divorcing his old helper Josephine, because she was childless, 
in order to secure the "continuity" of his "dynasty." ITapo- 



^^ rMPIRH of NAPOLIOK ^out ISIO 



S(^T (BRITAIN sEK ^^.^wC^^-r L 




iMrect ru.V 



Icon, thwarted of a Russian princess, snubbed indeed by Alex- 
ander, turned to Austria, and married the arch-duchess Marie 
Louise. The Austrian statesmen read him aright. They were 
very ready to throw him their princess. By that marriage 
ISTapoleon was captured for the dynastic system ; he might have 
been the maker of a new world, he preferred to be the son-in- 
law of the old. 

In the next two years this adventurer's affairs crumbled 
apace. ISTobody believed in his pretensions any more. He was 
no longer the leader and complement of the revolution ; no 
longer the embodied spirit of a world reborn ; he was just a new 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 909 

and nastier sort of autocrat. He had estranged all free^spirited 
men, and lie Lad antagonized the church. Kings and Jacobins 
were at one, when it came to the question of his overthrow. 
Only base and self-seeking people supported him, because he 
seemed to have the secret of success. Britain was now his 
inveterate enemy, Spain was blazing with a spirit that surely a 
Corsican should have understood ; it needed only a breach with 
Alexander I to set this empire of bluff and stage scenery sway- 
ing toward its downfall. The quarrel came. Alexander's feel- 
ings for Kapoleon had always been of a very mixed s<3rt ; ho 
envied Kapoleon as a rival, and despised him as an underbred 
upstart. Moreover, there was a kind of vague and sentimental 
greatness about Alexander ; he was given to mystical religiosity, 
he had the conception of a mission for Russia and himself to 
bring peace to Europe and the world — ^by destroying Napoleon. 
In that respect he had an imaginative greatness ISTapoleon 
lacked. But bringing peace to Europe seemed to him quite 
compatible with the annexation of Einland, of most of Poland, 
and of great portions of the Turkish empire. This man's mind 
moved in a luminous fog. And particularly ho wanted to re- 
sume trading with Britain, against which Napoleon had set his 
face. Eor all the trade of Germany had been dislocated and 
the mercantile classes embittered by the JSTapoleonic "Con- 
tinental System," which was to ruin Britain by excluding Brit- 
ish goods from every country in Europe. Eussia had suffered 
more even than Germany. 

The breach came in 1811, when Alexander withdrew from 
the "Continental System." In 1812 a great mass of annies, 
amounting altogether to 600,000 men, began to move towards 
Eussia under the supreme command of the new emperor. About 
half this force was Erench ; the rest was drawn from the French 
allies and subject peoples. It was a conglomerate army like the 
army of Darius or the army of Kavadh. The Spanish war was 
still going on; Napoleon made no attempt to end it. Alto- 
gether, it drained away a quarter of a million men from Erance. 
He fought his way across Poland and Eussia to Moscow before 
the winter — for the most part the Eussian armies declined bat- 
tle — and even before the winter closed in upon him his posi- 
tion became manifestly dangerous. He took Moscow, expecting 
that this would oblige Alexander to make peace. Alexander 
would not make peace, and Napoleon found himself in much 



910 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the same position as Darius had been in 2,300 years "before iu 
South Kussia. The Russians, still unconquered in a decisive 
battle, raided his communications, wasted his army — disease 
helped them; even before ISTapoleon reached Moscow 150,000 
men had been lost. But he lacked the wisdom of Darius, and 
would not retreat. The winter remained mild for an unusually 
long time — ^he could have escaped ; but instead he remained in 
Moscow, making impossible plans, at a loss. He had been 
man^ellously lucky in all his previous flounderings; he had 
escaped undeserved^ from Egypt, he had been saved from de- 
struction in Britain by the British naval victories ; but now 
lie was in the net again, and this time he was not to escape. 
Perhaps he would have wintered in Moscow, but the Rus- 
sians smoked him out; they set fire to and burnt most of the 
city. 

It was late in October, too late altogether, before he decided 
to return. He made an ineffectual attempt to break through 
to a fresh line of retreat to the south-west, and then turned 
the faces of the survivors of his Grand Army towards the coun- 
try they had devastated in their advance. Immense distances 
separated them from any friendly territory. The vanter v/as 
in no hurry. For a week the Grand Army struggled through 
mud ; then came sharp frosts, and then the first flakes of snow, 
and then snow and snow. . . . 

Slowly discipline dissolved. The hungry army spread itself 
out in search of supplies until it broke up into mere bands of 
marauders. The peasants, if only in self-defence, rose against 
them, waylaid them, and murdered them; a cloud of light 
cavalry — Scythians still — hunted them down. That retreat is 
one of the great tragedies of history. 

At last !N^apoleon and his staff and a handful of guards and 
attendants reappeared in Germany, bringing no army with him, 
followed only by straggling and demoralized bands. The Grand 
Army, retreating under Murat, reached Konigsberg in a dis- 
ciplined state, but only about a thousand strong out of six hun- 
dred thousand. From Konigsberg Murat fell back to Posen. 
The Prussian contingent had surrendered to the Russians ; the 
Austrians had gone homeward to the south. Everywhere scat- 
tered fugitives, ragged, lean, and frost-bitten, spread the news 
of the disaster. 

IN'apoleon's magic was nearly exhausted. He did not dare to 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 911 

stay with his troops iu GermaBy ; he fled post haste to Paris. 
He began to order new levies and gather fresh armies amidst 
the wreckage of his world empire. Austria turned against him 
(1813) ; all Europe was eager to rise against this defaulting 
trustee of freedom, this mere usui-per. He had betrayed the 
new order; the old order he had saved and revived now de- 
stroyed him. Prussia rose, and the German ^'War of Libera- 
tion" began. Sweden joined his enemies. Later Holland re- 
volted. Murat had rallied about 11,000 Frenchmen round his 
disciplined nucleus in Posen, and this force retreated through 
Germany, as a man might retreat who had ventured into a 
cageful of drugged lions and found that the effects of the drug 
were evaporating. Napoleon, with fresh forces, took up the 
chief command in the spring, won a great battle at Dresden, 
and then for a time he seems to have gone to pieces intellectually 
and morally. He became insanely irritable, with moods of in- 
action. He did little or nothing to follow up the Battle of 
Dresden. In September the "Battle of the ISTations" was fought 
round and about Leipzig, after which the Saxons, who had 
hitherto followed his star, went over to the allies. The end of 
the year saw the French beaten back into France. 

1814 was the closing campaign. France was invaded from 
the east and the south ; Swedes, Germans, Austrians, Russians, 
crossed the Ehine; British and Spanish came through the 
Pyrenees. Once more iNapoleon fought brilliantly, but now 
he fought ineffectually. The eastern armies did not so much 
defeat him as push past him, and Paris capitulated in March. 
A little later at Fontainebleau the emperor abdicated. 

In Provence, on his way out of the country, his life was en- 
dangered by a royalist mob. 

§ 5 

This was the natural and proper end of ISTapoleon's career. 
So this raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered be- 
ginnings of a new time should have closed. At last he was 
suppressed. And had there been any real wisdom in the conduct 
of human affairs^ we should now have to tell of the concentra- 
tion of human science and will upon the task his treachery 
and vanity had interrupted, the task of building up a world 
system of justice and free effort in the place of the bankrupt 



912 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 913 

ancient order. But we Ijave to tell of nothing of the sort. 
Science and wisdom were conspicuously ahsent from the great 
council of the Allies. Came the vague humanitarianism and 
dreamy vanity of the Tsar Alexander, came the shaken Habs- 
burgs of Austria, the resentful Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the 
aristocratic traditions of Britain, still badly frightened by the 
revolution and its conscience all awry with stolen commons and 
sweated factory children. [No peoples came to the Congress, 
but only monarchs and foreign ministers; and though you bray 
a foreign office in the bloodiest of war mortars, yet will its 
diplomatic habits not depart from it. The Congress had hardly 
assembled before the diplomatists set to work making secret 
bargains and treaties behind each other's backs. jSTothing could 
exceed the pompous triviality of the Congress which gathered 
at Vienna after a magnificent ceremonial visit of the allied 
sovereigns to London. The social side of the Congress was very 
strong, pretty ladies abounded, there was a galaxy of stars 
and uniforms, endless dinners and balls, a mighty flow of bright 
anecdotes and sparkling wit. Whether the two million dead 
men upon the battlefields laughed at the jokes, admired the 
assemblies, and marvelled at the diplomatists is beyond our 
knowledge. It is to be hoped their poor wraiths got something 
out of the display. The brightest spirit of the gathering was a 
certain Talleyrand, one of IN'apoleon's princes, a very brilliant 
man indeed, who had been a pre-revolutionary cleric, who had 
proposed the revolutionaiy confiscation of the church estates, 
and who was now for bringing back the Bourbons. 

The allies, after the fashion of Peace Congi-esses, frittered 
away precious time in more and more rapacious disputes ; the 
Bourbons returned to France. Back came all the remainder 
of the emigres with them, eager for restitution and revenge. 
One great egotism had been swept aside — only to reveal a crowd 
of meaner egotists. The new king was the brother of Louis 
XVI ; he had taken the title of Louis XVIII very eagerly so 
soon as he learnt that his little nephew (Louis XVII) was dead 
in the Temple. He was gouty and clumsy, not perhaps ill- 
disposed, but the symbol of the ancient system; all that was 
rew in France felt the heavy threat of reaction that came with 
him. This was no liberation, only a new tyranny, a heavy and 
inglorious tyranny instead of an active and splendid one. Was 
there no hojpe for France but this ? The Bourbons showed par- 



914 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ticular malice against the veterans of tlie Grand Army, and 
France was now full of returned prisoners of war, wlio found 
themselves under a cloud. jSTapoleon had been packed off to a 
little consolation empire of his own, upon the island of Elba. 
He was still to be called Emperor and keep a certain state. 
The chivalry or whim of Alexander had insisted upon this 
treatment of his fallen rival. The Habsburgs, who had toadied 
to his success, had taken awaj his Habsburg empress — she went 
willingly enough — to Vienna, and he never saw her again. 

After eleven months at Elba JSTapoleon judged that Erance 
had had enough of the Bourbons ; he contrived to evade the 
Eritish ships that watched his island, and reappeared at Cannes 
in Erance for his last gamble against fate. His progress to 
Paris was a triumphal procession; he walked on white Bour- 
bon cockades. For a hundred days, "the Hundred Days," he 
was master of France again. 

His return created a perplexing position for any honest 
Frenchman. On the one hand there was this adventurer who 
had betrayed the republic ; on the other the dull weight of old 
kingship restored. The allies would not hear of any further 
experiments in republicanism; it was the Bourbons or Napo- 
leon. Is it any wonder that on the whole France was with 
Xapoleon ? And he came back professing to be a changed man ; 
there was to be no more despotism ; he would respect the con- 
stitutional regime. . . . 

He gathered an army, he made some attempts at peace with 
the allies ; when he found these eiforts ineffectual, he struck 
sv/iftly at the British, Dutch, and Prussians in Belgium, hoping 
to defeat them before the Austrians and Russians could come 
up. He did very nearly manage this. He beat the Prussians 
at Liguy, but not sufficiently; and then he was hopelessly de- 
feated by the tenacity of the British under Wellington at 
Waterloo (1815), the Prussians, under Bliicher, coming in on 
his right flank as the day wore on. Waterloo ended in a rout ; 
it left ]Srapoleon without support and without hope. France 
fell away from him again. Everyone who had joined him was 
eager now to attack him, and so efface that error. A pro- 
visional government in Paris ordered him to leave the country ; 
was for giving him twenty-four hours to do it in. 

He tried to get to America, but Rochefort, which he reached, 
was watched by British cruisers. Erance, now disillusioned 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 915 

and •uncomfortably royalist again, was hot in pursuit of him. 
He went aboard a British frigate, the Bellerophon, asking to 
be received as a refugee, but being treated as a prisoner. He 
was taken to Plymouth, and from Plymouth straight to the 
lonely tropical island of St. Helena. 

There he remained until his death from cancer in 1821, 
devoting himself chiefly to the preparation of his memoirs, 
which were designed to exhibit the chief events of his life in a 
misleading and attractive light and to minimise his worst blun- 
ders. One or two of the men with him recorded his conversa- 
tions and set down their impressions of him. 

These works had a great vogue in France and Europe. The 
Holy Alliance of the monarchs of Eussia, Austria, and Prussia 
(to which other monarchs were invited to adhere) laboured 
under the delusion that in defeating IsTapoleon they had defeated 
the Eevolution, turned back the clock of fate, and restored 
Grand Monarchy — on a sanctified basis for evermore. The 
cardinal document of the scheme of the Holy Alliance is said 
to have been drawn up under the inspiration of the Baroness 
von Krlidener, who seems to have been a sort of spiritual direc- 
tor to the Pussian emperor. It opened, "In the name of the 
Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity," and it bound the partici- 
pating monarchs "regarding themselves towards their subjects 
and armies as fathers of families," and "considering each other 
as felbw-countrymen," to sustain each other, protect true 
religion, and urge their subjects to strengthen and exercise 
themselves in Christian duties. Christ, it was declared, was 
the real king of all Christian peoples, a very Merovingian king, 
one may remark, with these reigning sovereigns as his mayors 
of the palace. The British king had no power to sign this docu- 
ment, the pope and the sultan were not asked ; the rest of the 
European monarchs, including the king of Prance, adhered. 
But the king of Poland did not sign because there was no king 
in Poland; Alexander, in a mood of pious abstraction, was 
sitting on the greater part of Poland. The Holy Alliance never 
became an actual legal alliance of states; it gave place to a real 
league of nations, the Concert of Europe, which France joined 
in 1818, and from which Britain withdrew in 1822. 

There followed a period of peace and dull oppression in 
Europe over which Alexander brooded in attitudes of ortho- 
doxy, piety, and unquenchable self-satisfaction. Many people 



91G THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

in those hopeless days were disposed to regard even !N^apoleon 
with charity, and to accept his claim that in some inexplicahle 
way he had, in asserting himself, been asserting the revolntion 
and France. A cult of him as of something mystically heroic 
grew "up after his death. 



§ 6 

For nearly forty years the idea of the Holy Alliance, the 
Concert of Europe which arose out of it, and the series of 
congresses and conferences that succeeded the concert, kept an 
insecure peace in war-exhausted Europe. Two main things 
prevented that period from heing a complete social and inter- 
national peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars 
between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency 
of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair 
privilege, and interference with freedom of thought and writing 
and teaching. The second was the impossible system of 
boundaries drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna. 

The obstinate disposition of monarchy to march back towards 
past conditions was first and most particularly manifest in 
Spain. Here even the Inquisition was restored. Across the 
Atlantic the Spanish colonics had followed the example of the 
United States and revolted against the European Great Power 
system, when ISTapoleon set up his brother Joseph upon the 
Spanish throne in 1810. The Washington of South America 
was General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt, 
it dragged on much as the United States War of Independence 
had dragged on, and at last the suggestion was made by Austria 
in accordance with the spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the 
European monarchs should assist Spain in this struggle. This 
was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the prompt action 
of President Monroe of the United States in 1823 which con- 
clusively warned off this projected monarchist restoration. He 
announced that the United States would regard any extension 
of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile 
act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, which has kept the Great 
Power system out of America for nearly a hundred years, and 
permitted the new states of Spanish America to work out their 
destinies along their own lines. But if Spanish monarchism 
lost its colonies, it could at least, under the protection of the 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 917 

Concert of Europe, do -vvliat it cliose in Europe. A popular in- 
surrection in Spain was crushed "by a Frencli army in 1823, 
with, a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously 
Austria sujDpressed a revolution in ISlaples. The moving spirit 
in this conspiracy of governments against peoples was the Aus- 
trian statesman, Mettemich. 

In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by that Count 
d'Artois whom we have seen hovering as an emigre on the 
French frontiers in 1789; he took the title of Charles X. 
Charles set himself to destroy the liberty of the press and uni- 
versities, and to restore absolute government; the sum of a 
billion francs was voted to compensate the nobles for the chateau 
burnings and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris roso 
against this embodiment of the ancient regime, and replaced 
him by the son of that sinister Philip, Duhe of Orleans, whose 
execution was one of the brightest achievements of the Terror. 
The other continental monarchies, in face of the open approval 
of the revolution by Great Britain and a strong liberal ferment 
in Germany and Austria, did not interfere in this affair. After 
all, Franco was still a monarchy. This young man, Louis 
Philippe (1830-48), remained the constitutional king of France 
for eighteen years. He went down in 1848, a very eventful 
year for Europe, of which we shall tell in the next chapter. 

Such were the uneasy swaylngs of the peace of the Congress 
of Vienna, which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings 
to which, sooner or later, all monarchist courts seem by their 
very nature to gravitate. The stresses that arose from the un- 
scientific map-making of the diplomatists gathered force more 
deliberately, but they were even more dangerous to the peace of 
mankind. It is extraordinarily Inconvenient to administer to- 
gether the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and 
so reading different literatures and having different general 
ideas, especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious 
disputes. Only some strong mutual Interest, such as the com- 
mon defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a 
close linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths; and 
even in Switzerland there Is the utmost local autonomy. Fltl- 
mately, when the Great Power tradition is certainly dead and 
burled, those Swiss populations may gravitate towards their 
natural affinities In Germany, France, and Italy. When, as in 
Macedonia, populations are mixed In a patchwork of villages 



918 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



and districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But 
if the reader will look at tlie map of Europe as the Congress 
of Vienna drew it, he will see that this gathering seems almost 
as if it had planned the maximum of local exasperation. It 
destroyed the Dutch Eepublic, quite needlessly, it lumped to- 
gether the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics 



:EUR0P£ aAzv ike Gm^crcss- of 



tcntUL — ' 




of the old Spanish (Austrian) iN'etherlands, and set up a king- 
dom of the Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old 
republic of Venice, but all of ISTorth Italy as far as Milan to 
the German-speaking Austrians. French-speaking Savoy it 
combined with pieces of Italy to restore the kingdom of Sar- 
dinia. Austria and Hungary, already a sufficiently explosive 
mixture of discordant nationalities, Germans, Hungarians, 
Czeeho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Eumanians, and now Italians, was 
made still more impossible by confirming Austria's Polish 
acquisitions of 17Y2 and 1795. The Polish people, being catho- 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 919 

lie and republican-spirited, were chiefly given over to the leas 
civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important dis- 
tricts went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was also confirmed 
in his acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The very dis- 
similar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together 
under one king. Gennany, the reader will see, was left in a 
particularly dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria 
were both partly in and partly out of a German confederation, 
which included a multitude of minor states. The King of Den- 
mark came into the German confederation by virtue of certain 
German-speaking possessions in Holstein. Luxembourg was in- 
cluded in the German Confederation, though its ruler was also 
king of the Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked 
French. Here was a crazy tangle, an outrage on the common 
sense of mankind, a preposterous disregard of the fact that the 
people who talk German and base their ideas on German litera- 
ture, the people who talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian 
literature, and the people who talk Polish and base their ideas 
on Polish literature, will all be far better off and most helpful 
and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind if they conduct their 
own aifairs in their own idiom within the ring-fence of their own 
speech. Is it any Avonder that one of the most popular songs in 
Germany during this period declared that wherever the Ger- 
man tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland ? 

Even to-day men are still reluctant to recognize that areas 
of government are not matters for the bargaining and interplay 
of tsars and kings and foreign offices. There is a natural and 
necessary 'political map of the world which transcends these 
things. There is a best ivay possible of dividing any part of 
the world into administrative areas, and a best possible kind of 
government for every area, having regard to the speech and 
race of its inhabitants, and it is the common concern of all men 
of intelligence to secure those divisions and establish those 
forms of government quite irrespective of diplomacies and flags, 
"claims" and melodramatic "loyalties" and the existing po- 
litical map of the world. The natural political map of the 
world insists upon itself. It heaves and frets beneath 
the artificial political map like some misfitted giant. In 
1830 French-speakng Belgium, stirred up by the current 
revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association in 
the kingdom of the Netherlands. The Powers, terrified at the 



920 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

possibility of a republic and of ainiexation to France, hurried 
in to pacify this situation, and gave the Belgians a monarch 
from that rich breeding-ground of monarchs, Germany, Leopold 
I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There were also ineffectual revolts 
in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much more serious one 
in Kussian Poland. A republican government held out in War- 
saw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander 
in 1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great 
violence and cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and 
the Greek Orthodox church was substituted for the Eoman 
Catholic as the State religion. . . . 

An outbreak of the natural political map of the world, which 
occurred in 1821, ultimately secured the support of England, 
France, and Russia. This was the insurrection of the Greeks 
against the Turks. For six years they fought a desperate war, 
while the governments of Europe looked on. Liberal opinion 
protested against this inactivity; volunteers from every Euro- 
pean country joined the insurgents, and at last Britain, France, 
and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed 
by the French and English at the Battle of Navarino (1827), 
and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople 
(1829) Greece was declared free, but she was not permitted 
to resume her ancient republican traditions. There is a sort 
of historical indecency in a Greek monarchy. But a Greek 
republic would have been dangerous to all monarchy in a Europe 
that fretted under the ideas of the Holy Alliance. A German 
king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto of Bavaria, slightly 
demented, but quite royal — he gave way to delusions about his 
divine right, and was ejected in 1862— and Christian governors 
were set up in the Danubian provinces (which are now Ru- 
mania) and Serbia (a part of the Jugo-Slav region). 
This was a partial concession to the natural political map, but 
much blood had still to run before the Turk was altogether 
expelled from these lands. 

A little later the natural political map was to assert itself in 
Italy and Germany. 



CAREER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE 921 




XXXVIII 

THE EEALITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY 

1. The MecJiunical Revolution. § 2. Relation of ihe Me- 
cJimiical to the Industrial Revolution. § 3. The Fermenta- 
tion of Ideas, 184S. § 4. The Development of the Idea of 
Socialism. § 5. Shortcomings of Socialism as a Scheme of 
Human Society. § 6. How Darwinism Affected Religious 
and Political Ideas. § 7. The Idea of Nationalism. § 8. 
Europe Between ISJkS and 1878. § 9. The (Second) 
Scramble for Overseas Empires. § 10. The Indian Prece- 
dent in Asia. § 11. The History of Japan. § 12. Close of 
the Period of Overseas Expansion. § 13. The British Em- 
pire in 191Ji. 



THE career and personality of Napoleon I bulks dispro- 
portionately in the nineteenth century histories. He 
was of little significance to the broad onward movement 
of human affairs ; he was an interruption, a reminder of latent 
evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence. Even 
regarded as a pestilence, he was not of supreme rank ; he killed 
far fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918, and pro- 
duced less political and social disruption than the plague of 
Justinian. Some such interlude had to happen, and some such 
patched-up settlement of Europe as the Concert of Europe, be- 
cause there was no worked-out system of ideas upon which a new 
world could be constnicted. And even the Concert of Europe 
had in it an element of progress. It did at least set aside the 
individualism of Machiavellian monarchy and declare that there 
was a human or at any rate a European commonweal. If it 
divided the world among the kings, it made respectful gestures 
towards human unity and the service of God and man. 

922 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 923 

The permanently effective task before mankind which had 
to be done before any new and enduring social and political 
edifice was possible, the task iipon which the human intelli- 
gence is, with many interruptions and amidst much anger and 
turmoil, still engaged, was, and is, the task of working out and 
applying a Science of Property as a basis for freedom and 
social justice, a Science of Currency to ensure and pre- 
serve an efficient economic medium, a Science of Gov- 
ernment and Collective Operations whereby in every community 
men may learn to pursue their common interests in har- 
mony, a Science of World Politics, through which the stark 
waste and cruelty of warfare between races, peoples, and nations 
may be brought to an end and the common interests of mankind 
brought under a common control, and, above all, a world-wide 
System of Education to sustain the will and interest of men 
in their common human adventure. The real makers of history 
in the nineteenth century, the people whose consequences will 
be determining human life a century ahead, were those who 
advanced and contributed to this fivefold constructive effort. 
Compared to them, the foreign ministers and "statesmen" and 
politicians of this period were no more than a number of 
troublesome and occasionally ihcendiary schoolboys — and a few 
metal thieves — playing about and doing transitory mischief 
amidst the accumulating materials upon the site of a great build- 
ing whose nature they did not understand. 

And while throughout the nineteenth century the mind of 
Western civilization, which the Renascence had released, 
gathered itself to the task of creative social and political re- 
construction that still lies before it, there swept across the world 
a wave of universal change in human power and the material 
conditions of life that the first scientific efforts of that liberated 
mind had made possible. The prophecies of Roger Bacon began 
to live in reality. The accumulating knowledge and confidence 
of the little succession of men who had been carrying on the 
development of science, now began to bear fruit that common 
men could understand. The most obvious firstfruit was the 
steam-engine. The first steam-engines in the eighteenth century 
were pumping engines used to keep water out of the newly 
opened coal mines. These coal mines were being worked to 
supply coke for iron smelting, for which wood-charcoal had pre- 
viously been employed. It was James Watt, a mathematical 



924 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

instrument maker of Glasgow, who improved this steam-pump- 
ing engine and made it available for the driving of machinery. 
The first engine so employed was installed in a cotton mill in 
[Nottingham in 1785. Iii 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt 
engine to transport, and made the first locomotive. In 1825 
the first railway, between Stockton and Darlington, was opened 
for traffic. The original engine (locomotive No. 1, 1825) still 
adorns Darlington platform. By the middle of the century a 
network of railways had spread all over Europe. 

Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed 
condition of human life, the maximum rate of land transport. 
After the Russian disaster, ISTapoleon travelled from near Vilna 
to Paris in 312 hours. This was a journey of about 1,400 
miles. He was travelling with every conceivable advantage, and 
he averaged under five miles an hour. An ordinary traveller 
could not have done this distance in twice the time. These 
were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good be- 
tween Eome and Gaul in the first century a.d., or between 
Sardis and Susa in the fourth century b.c. Then suddenly 
came a tremendous change. The railways reduced this journey 
for any ordinary traveller to less than forty-eight hours. That 
is to say, they reduced the chief European distances to about a 
tenth of what they had been. They made it possible to carry 
out administrative work in areas ten times as great as any that 
had hitherto been workable under one administration. The full 
significance of that possibility in Europe still remains to be 
realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries drawn in the 
horse and road era. In America the effects were immediate. 
To the United States of America, sprawling westward, it meant 
the possibility of a continuous access to Washingion, however 
far the frontier travelled across the continent. It meant unity, 
sustained on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible. 

The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam- 
engine in its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the Char- 
lotte Dundas, on the Eirth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 
an American named Fulton had a paying steamer, The Cler- 
mont, with British-built engines, upon the Hudson river above 
N'ew York. The first steamship to put to sea was also an 
American, the Phcsnix, which went from Kew York (Hoboken) 
to Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she 
also had sails) to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 925 

these were paddle-wheel boats, and paddle-wheel boats are not 
adapted to work in heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, 
and the boat is then disabled. The screw steamship followed 
rather slowly. Many difficulties had to be surmounted before 
the screw was a practicable thing. Not until the middle of the 
eentur)^ did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin to 
overhaul that of sailing-ships. After that the evolution in sea 
transport was rapid. For the first time men began to cross 
the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the date of their 
arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been an uncer- 
tain adventure of several weeks — which might stretch to months 
— was accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in the 
case of the fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically 
notifiable hour of arrival. All over the oceans there was the 
same reduction in the time and the same increase in the cer- 
tainty of human communications. 

Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon 
land and sea a new and striking addition to the facilities of 
human intercourse arose out of the investigations of Volta, 
Galvani, and Faraday into various electrical phenomena. The 
electric telegraph came into existence in 1835. The first under- 
seas cable was laid in 1851 between France and England. In 
a few years the telegraph system had spread over the civilized 
world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from 
point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the 
earth. 

These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, 
were to the popular imagination of the middle nineteenth cen- 
tury the most striking and revolutionary of inventions, but they 
were only the most conspicuous and clumsy firstfruits of a far 
more extensive process. Technical knowledge and skill were 
developing with an extraordinaiy rapidity, and to an extraordi- 
nary extent measured by the progress of any previous age. Far 
less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but finally far more 
important, was the extension of man's power over various stinic- 
tural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth century 
iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood-charcoal, was 
handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. 
It was material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were 
enormously dependent upon the experience and sagacity of 
the individual iron worker. The largest masses of iron that 



926 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

could be dealt with under those conditions amounted at most 
(in the sixteenth century) to two or three tons. (There was a 
very definite upward limit, therefore, to the size of cannon.) 
The blast furnace arose in the eighteenth century, and developed 
with the use of coke. ISTot before the eighteenth century do we 
find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783). 
Nasmyth's steam hammer came as late as 1838. The ancient 
world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could not use 
steam. The steam-engine, even the primitive pumping engine, 
could not develop before sheet iron was available. The early 
engines seem to the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits 
or ironmongery, but they were the utmost that the metallurgical 
science of the time could do. As late as 185G came the Bessemer 
process, and presently (1864) the open-hearth process, in which 
steel and every sort of iron could be melted, purified, and cast 
in a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard of. To-day in 
the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel 
swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan, l^othing in 
the previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in 
its consequences to the complete mastery over enormous masses 
of steel and iron and over their texture and quality which man 
has now achieved. The railways and early engines of all sorts 
were the mere first triumphs of the new metallurgical methods. 
Presently came ships of iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new 
way of building with steel upon a gigantic scale. Men realized 
too late that they had planned their railways with far too timid 
a gauge, that they could have organized their travelling with 
far more steadiness and comfort upon a much bigger scale. 

Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the 
world much over 2,000 tons burthen ; now there is nothing won- 
derful about a 50,000-ton liner. There are people who sneer 
at this kind of progTess as being a progress in '%ere size," but 
that sort of sneering merely marks the intellectual limitations 
of those who indulge in it. The great ship or the steel-frame 
building is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of the 
small ship or building of the past ; it is a thing difi^erent in kind, 
more lightly and strongly built, of finer and stronger materials ; 
instead of being a thing of precedent and mle-of-thumb, it is a 
thing of subtle and intricate calculation. In the old house or 
ship, matter was dominant — the material and its needs had to 
be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter has been captured, 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 927 

changed, coerced. Think of the coal and iron and sand dragged 
out of the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten, and cast, 
to be flung at last, a slender, glittering pinnacle of steel and 
glass, six hundred feet above the crowded city ! 

We have given these particulars of the advance in man's 
knowledge of the metallurgy of steel and its results by way 
of illustration. A parallel story could be told of the metallurgy 
of copper and tin, and of a multitude of metals, nickel and 
aluminium to name but two, unknown before the ninteenth cen- 
tury dawned. It is in this great and growing mastery over 
substances, over diiferent sorts of glass, over rocks and plasters 
and the like, over colours and textures, that the main triumphs 
of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet 
we are still in the stage of the firstfruits in the matter. We 
have the power, but we have still to learn how to use our power. 
Many of the first employments of these gifts of science have 
been vulgar, tawdry, stupid, or horrible. The artist and the 
adaptor have still hardly begun to work with the endless variety 
of substances now at their disposal. 

Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the 
new science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties 
of the nineteenth century that this bod}^ of inquiry began to 
yield results to impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came 
electric light and electric traction, and the transmutation of 
forces, the possibility of sending poiver, that could be changed 
into mechanical motion or light or heat as one chose, along a 
copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began to come through 
to the ideas of ordinary people. . . . 

The British and the French were at first the leading peoples 
in this great proliferation of knowledge ; but presently the Ger- 
mans, who had learnt humility under Napoleon, showed such 
zeal and pertinacity in scientific inquiry as to overhaul these 
leaders. British science was largely the creation of Englishmen 
and Scotchmen ^ working outside the ordinary centres of 
erudition.^ We have told how in England the universities after 

*But note Boyle and Sir Wm. Hamilton as conspicuous scientific men 
who were Irishmen. 

* It is worth noting that nearly all the great inventors in England dur- 
ing the eighteenth century were working men, that inventions proceeded 
from the workshop, and not from the laboratory. It is also worth noting 
that only two of these inventors accumulated fortunes and founded 
families. — E. B. 



928 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the reformation ceased to have a wide popular appeal, how they 
became the educational preserve of the nobility and gentry, and 
the strongholds of the established church. A pompous and un- 
intelligent classical pretentiousness dominated them, and they 
dominated the schools of the middle and upper classes. The 
only knowledge recognized was an uncritical textual knowledge 
of a selection of Latin and Greek classics, and the test of a good 
style was its abundance of quotations, allusions, and stereotyped 
expressions. The early development of British science went on, 
therefore, in spite of the formal educational organization, and 
in the teeth of the bitter hostility of the teaching and clerical 
professions. French education, too, was dominated by the clas- 
sical tradition of the Jesuits, and consequently it was not diffi- 
cult for the Germans to organize a body of investigators, small 
indeed in relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in 
proportion to the little band of British and French inventors 
and experimentalists. And though this work of research and 
experiment was making Britain and France the most rich and 
powerful countries in the world, it was not making scientific 
and inventive men rich and powerful. There is a necessary un- 
worldliness about a sincere scientific man ; he is too preoccupied 
with his research to plan and scheme how to make money out of 
it. The economic exploitation of his discoveries falls very easily 
and naturally, therefore, into the hands of a more acquisitive 
type; and so we find that the crops of rich men which every 
fresh phase of scientific and technical progress has produced in 
Great Britain, though they have not displayed quite the same 
passionate desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the na- 
tional golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions, 
have been quite content to let that profitable creature starve. 
Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for 
cleverer people to profit by. 

In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The Ger- 
man "learned" did not display the same vehement hatred of 
the new learning. They permitted its development. The 
German business man and manufacturer again had not quite 
the same contempt for the man of science as had his British 
competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a 
cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, 
therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind ; 
their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 929 

greater, and this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. 13y 
the latter half of the nineteenth century the German scientitic 
worker had made German a necessary language for every sci- 
ence student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work 
in his department, and in certain branches, and particularly in 
chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority over her 
western neighbours. The scientific effort, of the sixties and 
seventies in Gonnany began to tell after the eighties, and the 
Germans gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical 
and industrial prosperity. 

In an Outline of History such as this it is impossible to 
trace the network of complex mental processes that led to the 
incessant extension of knowledge and power that is now going 
on; all we can do here is to call the reader's attention to the 
most salient turning-points that finally led the toboggan of 
human affairs into its present swift ice-run of progress. We 
have told of the first release of human curiosity and of the be- 
ginnings of systematic inquiry and experiment. We have told, 
too, how, when the plutocratic Roman system and its resultant 
imperialism had come and gone again, this process of inquiry 
was renewed. We have told of the escape of investigation from 
ideas of secrecy and personal advantage to the idea of publica- 
tion and a brotherhood of knowledge, and we have noted the 
foundation of the British Royal Society, the Florentine Society, 
and their like as a consequence of this socializing of thought. 
These things were the roots of the mechanical revolution, and 
so long as the root of pure scientific inquiry lives, that revolu- 
tion will progi-ess. The mechanical revolution itself began, 
we may say, with the exhaustion of the wood supply for the 
ironworks of England. This led to the use of coal, the coal 
mine led to the simple pumping engine, the development of the 
pumping engine by Watt into a machine-driving engine led on 
to the locomotive and the steamship. This was the first phase 
©f a great expansion in the use of steam. A second phase in 
the mechanical revolution began with the application of elec- 
trical science to practical problems and the development of elec- 
tric lighting, power transmission, and traction. 

A third phase is to be distinguished when in the eighties a 
new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the ex- 
pansive force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive 
force of steam. The light, highly efficient engines that were 



930 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

thus made possible were applied to the automobile, and de- 
veloped at last to reach such a pitch of lightness and efficiency 
as to render flight^ — long known to be possible — a practical 
achievement. A successful flying-machine — but not a machine 
large enough to take up a human body — was made by Professor 
Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early 
as 1897. By 1909 the aeroplane was available for human loco- 
motion. There had seemed to be a pause in the increase of 
human speed with the perfection of railways and automobile 
road traction, but with the flying machine came fresh reductions 
in the eifective distance between one point of the earth's surface 
and another. In the eighteenth century the distance from Lon- 
don to Edinburgh was an eight days' journey; in 1918 the 
British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the jour- 
ney from London to Melbourne, half-way round the earth, would 
probably, in a few years' time, be accomplished in that same 
period of eight days. 

Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reduc- 
tions in the time distances of one place from another. They 
are merely one aspect of a much profounder and more mo- 
mentous enlargement of human possibility. The science of 
agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance, made quite 
parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt 
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple 
the crops got from the same area in the seventeenth century. 
There was a still more extraordinary advance in medical sci- 
ence; the average duration of life rose, the daily efficiency 
increased, the waste of life through ill-health diminished. 

ISTow here altogether we have such a change in human life as 
to constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than 
a century this mechanical revolution has been brought about. 
In that time man made a stride in the material conditions of 
his life vaster than he had done during the whole long interval 
between the palaeolithic stage and the age of cultivation, or 
between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those of George III. 
A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has come 
into existence. Clearly it demands gi^at readjustments of our 
social, economical, and political methods. But these readjust- 
ments have necessarily waited upon the development of the 
mechanical revolution, and they are still only in their opening 
stage to-day. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 931 



There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together 
what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was 
an entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the 
development of organized science, a new step like the invention 
of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else, 
quite different in its origins, something for which there was 
already an historical precedent, the social and financial develop- 
ment which is called the industrial revolution. The two proc- 
esses were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon 
each other, but they were in root and essence different. There 
would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had 
been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would 
probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the 
social and financial developments of the later years of the 
Roman republic. It would have repeated the story of dis- 
possessed free cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great finan- 
cial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process. 
Even the factory method came before power and machin- 
ery. Factories were the product not of machinery, but 
of the "division of labour." Drilled and sweated workers were 
making such things as millinery, cardboard boxes and furniture, 
and colouring maps and book illustrations, and so forth, before 
even water-wheels had been used for industrial processes. There 
were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus, l^ew books, 
for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories 
of the book-sellers. The attentive student of Defoe and of the 
political pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the idea of 
herding poor people into establishments to work collectively for 
their living was already current in Britain before the close of 
the seventeenth century. There are intimations of it even as 
early as More's Utopia (1516). It was a social and not a 
mechanical development. 

Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social 
and economic history of western Europe was in fact retreading 
the path along which the Roman State had gone in the three 
last centuries b.c. America was in many ways a new Spain, 
and India and China a new Egypt. But the political disunions 
of Europe, the political convulsions against monarchy, the re- 
calcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the greater 



932 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

accessibility of the weste*'n European intelligence to meclianical 
ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel direc- 
tions. Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were 
far more widely diffused in this newer European world, political 
power was not so concentrated, and the man of energy anxious 
to get rich turned his mind, therefore, very willingly from the 
ideas of the slave and of gang labour to the idea of mechanical 
power and the machine. 

The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical inven- 
tion and discovery, was a new thing in human experience, and 
it went on regardless of the social, political, economic, and in- 
dustrial consequences it might produce. The industrial revolu- 
tion, on the other hand, like most other human affairs, was and 
is more and more profoundly changed and deflected by the con- 
stant variation in human conditions caused by the mechanical 
revolution. And the essential difference between the amassing 
of riches, the extinction of small farmers and small business 
men and the phase of big finance in the latter centuries of the 
Roman Republic on the one hand, and the very similar con- 
centration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
on the other, lies in the profound difference in the character of 
labour that the mechanical revolution was bringing about. The 
power of the old world was human power ; everything depended 
ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle 
of ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, sup- 
plied by draft oxen, horse traction, and the like, contributed. 
Where a weight had to be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock 
had to be quarried, men chipped it out; where a field had to 
be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it ; the Roman equivalent 
of the steamship was the galley with its banks of sweating 
rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early civilizations 
was employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its onset, 
power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any release 
from such unintelligent toil.. Great gangs of men were em- 
ployed in excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and 
embankments, and the like. The number of miners increased 
enormously. But the extension of facilities and the output of 
commodities increased much more. And as the nineteenth cen- 
tury went on, the plain logic of the new situation asserted itself 
more clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a source 
of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done mechani- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 933 

cally by a liTiman beins; could be done faster and better by a 
machine. The human being was needed now only where choice 
and intelligence had to be exercised. Human beings were 
wanted only as human beings. The drudge, on whom all the 
previous civilizations had rested, the creature of mere obedi- 
ence, the man whose brains were superfluous, had become un- 
necessary to the welfare of mankind. 

This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture 
and mining as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For 
ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, swift machines came for- 
ward to do the work of scores of men.^ The Roman civiliza- 
tion was built upon cheap and degraded human beings ; modern 
civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical power. For 
a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour 
dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait 
its turn in the mine, it is simply because for a time men were 
cheaper than machinery.^ 

!N^ow here was a change-over of quite primary importance in 
human affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the 
ruler in the old civilization had been to keep up a supply of 
drudges. As the nineteenth century went on, it became more 
and more plain to the intelligent directive people that the 
common man had now to be something better than a drudge. 
He had to be educated — if only to secure "industrial efficiency." 
He had to understand what he was about. From the days of 
the first Christian propaganda, popular education had been 
smouldering in Europe, just as it has smouldered in Asia wher- 
ever Islam has set its foot, because of the necessity of making 
the believer understand a little of the belief by which he is 
saved, and of enabling him to read a little in the sacred books 
by which his belief is conveyed. Christian controversies, with 
their competition for adherents, ploughed the ground for the 
harvest of popular education. In England, for instance, by 
the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes 
of the sects and the necessity of catching adherents young had 
produced an abundance of night schools, Sunday schools, and a 
series of competing educational organizations for children, the 

^Here America led the old world. 

*In Northumberland and Durham in the early days of coal mining they 
were so cheaply esteemed that it was unusual to hold inquests on the 
bodies of men killed in mine disasters. 



934 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

dissenting British schools, the churcli National Schools^ and 
even Roman Catholic elementary schools. The earlier, less 
enlightened manufacturers, unable to take a broad view of their 
own interests, hated and opposed these schools. But here again 
needy Germany led her richer neighbours. The religious 
teacher in Britain presently found the profit-seeker at his side, 
unexpectedly eager to get the commonalty, if not educated, at 
least "trained" to a higher level of economic efficiency. 

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of 
rapid advance in popular education throughout all the West- 
ernized world. There was no parallel advance in the education 
of the upper classes, some advance no doubt, but nothing to 
correspond, and so the great gulf that had divided that world 
hitherto into the readers and the non-reading mass became little 
more than a slightly perceptible difference in educational level. 
At the back of this process was the mechanical revolution, ap- 
parently regardless of social conditions, but really insisting 
inexorably upon the complete abolition of a totally illiterate 
class throughout the world. 

The economic revolution of the Roman republic had never 
been clearly apprehended by the common people of Rome. The 
ordinary Roman citizen never saw the changes through which 
he lived, clearly and comprehensively as we see them. But the 
industrial revolution, as it went on towards the end of the nine- 
teenth century, was more and more distinctly seen as one whole 
process by the common people it was affecting, because presently 
they could read and discuss and communicate, and because they 
went about and saw things as no commonalty had ever done 
before. 

In this Outline of History we have been careful to indicate 
the gradual appearance of the ordinary people as a class with a 
will and ideas in common. It is the writer's belief that massive 
movements of the "ordinary people" over considerable areas 
only became possible as a result of the propagandist religions, 
Christianity and Islam, and their insistence upon individual 
self-respect. We have cited the enthusiasm of the commonalty 
for the First Crusade as marking a new phase in social history. 
But before the nineteenth century even these massive movements 
were comparatively restricted. The equalitarian insurrections 
of the peasantry, from the Wycliffe period onward, were confined 
to the peasant communities of definite localities, they spread 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 935 

only slowly into districts affected by similar forces. The town 
artisan rioted indeed, but only locally. The chateau-burning of 
the French revolution was not the act of a peasantry who had 
overthrown a government, it was the act of a peasantry released 
by the overthrow of a government. The Commune of Paris was 
the first effective appearance of the town artisan as a political 
power, and the Parisian crowd of the First Revolution was a 
very mixed, primitive-thinking, and savage crowd compared with 
any Western European crowd after 1830. 

But the mechanical revolution was not only pressing educa- 
tion upon the whole population, it was leading to a big-capital- 
ism and to a large-scale reorganization of industry that was to 
produce a new and distinctive system of ideas in the common 
people in the place of the mere uncomfortable recalcitrance and 
elemental rebellions of an illiterate commonalty. We have al- 
ready noted how the industrial revolution had split the manu- 
facturing class, which had hitherto been a middling and various 
sort of class, into two sections, the employers, who became rich 
enough to mingle with the financial, merchandizing, and land- 
owning classes, and the employees, who drifted to a status closer 
and closer to that of mere gang and agricultural labour. As the 
manufacturing employee sank, the agricultural labourer, by the 
introduction of agricultural machinery and the increase in his 
individual productivity, rose. By the middle of the nineteenth 
century, Karl Marx (1818-83), a German Jew of great schol- 
arly attainments, who did much of his work in the British 
Museum library in London, was pointing out that the organ- 
ization of the working classes by the steadily concentrating group 
of capitalist owners, was developing a new social classification 
to replace the more complex class systems of the past. Prop- 
erty, so far as it was power, was being gathered together into 
relatively few hands, the hands of the big rich men, the capitalist 
class ; while there was a great mingling of workers with little or 
no property, whom he called the "expropriated," or "prole- 
tariat" — a misuse of this word — who were bound to develop a 
common "class consciousness" of the conflict of their interests 
with those of the rich men. Differences of education and tradi- 
tion between the various older social elements which were in 
process of being fused up into the new class of the expropriated, 
seemed for a time to contradict this sweeping generalization; 
the traditions of the professions, the small employers, the farmer 



936 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

peasant and the like were all different from one another and 
from the various craftsman traditions of the workers ; bnt with 
the spread of education and the cheapening of literature, this 
"Marxian" generalization becomes now more and more accept- 
able. These classes, who were linked at first by nothing but a 
common impoverishment, were and are being reduced or raised 
to the same standard of life, forced to read the same books and 
share the same inconveniences. A sense of solidarity between 
all sorts of poor and propertyless men, as against the profit- 
amassing and wealth-concentrating class, is growing more and 
more evident in our world. Old differences fade away, the dif- 
ference between craftsman and open-air worker, between black 
coat and overall, between poor clergyman and elementary school- 
master, between policeman and bus-driver. They must all buy 
the same cheap furnishings and live in similar cheap houses ; 
their sons and daughters will all mingle and marry ; success at 
the upper levels becomes more and more hopeless for the rank 
and file. Marx, who did not so much advocate the class-war, 
the war of the expropriated mass against the appropriating few, 
as foretell it, is being more and more justified by events.^ 

§ 3 

To trace any broad outlines in the fermentation of ideas 
that went on during the mechanical and industrial revolution 
of the nineteenth century is a very difficult task. But we must 
attempt it if we are to link what has gone before in this history 
with the condition of our world to-day. 

It will be convenient to distinguish two main periods in the 
hundred years between 1814 and 1914. First came the period 
1814-48, in which there was a very considerable amount of 
liberal thinking and writing in limited circles, but during which 
there were no great changes or development of thought in the 
general mass of the people. Throughout this period the world's 

^ It is sometimes argued against Marx that the proportion of people 
who have savings invested has increased in many modern communities. 
These savings are technically "capital" and their owners "capitalists" to 
that extent, and this is supposed to contradict the statement of Marx 
that property concentrates into few and fewer hands. Marx used many 
of his terms carelessly and chose them ill, and his ideas were better than 
his words. When he wrote property he meant "property so far as it is 
power." The small investor has remarkably little power over his in- 
vested capital. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 937 

affairs were living, so to speak, on their old intellectual capital, 
they were going on in accordance with the leading ideas of the 
Kevolution and the counter-revolution. The dominant liberal 
ideas were freedom and a certain vague equalitarianism; the 
conservative ideas were monarchy, organized religion, social 
privilege, and obedience. 

Until 1848 the spirit of the Holy Alliance, the spirit of 
Metternich, struggled to prevent a revival of the European revo- 
lution that Napoleon had betrayed and set back. In America, 
both North and South, on the other hand, the revolution had 
triumphed and nineteenth-century liberalism ruled unchallenged. 
Britain was an uneasy country, never quite loyally reactionary 
nor quite loyally progressive, neither tnily monarchist nor truly 
republican, the land of Cromwell and also of the Merry Mon- 
arch, Charles ; anti-Austrian, anti-Bourbon, anti-papal, yet 
weakly repressive. We have told of the first series of liberal 
storms in Europe in and about the year 1830 ; in Britain in 1832 
a Eeform Bill, greatly extending the franchise and restoring 
something of its representative character to the House of Com- 
mons, relieved the situation. Round and about 1848 came a 
second and much more serious system of outbreaks, that over- 
threw the Orleans monarchy and established a second Republic 
in France (1848-52), raised North Italy and Hungary against 
Austria, and the Poles in Posen against the Germans, and 
sent the Pope in flight from the republicans of Rome. A very 
interesting Pan-Slavic conference held at Prague foreshadowed 
many of the territorial readjustments of 1919. It dispersed 
after an insurrection at Prague had been suppressed by Aus- 
trian troops. 

Ultimately all these insurrections failed ; the current system 
staggered, but kept its feet. There were no doubt serious social 
discontents beneath these revolts, but as yet, except in the case 
of Paris, these had no very clear form; and this 1848 storm, so 
far as the rest of Europe was concerned, may be best described, 
in a phrase, as a revolt of the natural political map against 
the artificial arrangements of the Vienna diplomatists, and the 
system of suppressions those arrangements entailed. 

The history of Europe, then, from 1815 to 1848 was, gen- 
erally speaking, a sequel to the history of Europe from 1789 to 
1814. There were no really new motifs in the composition. 
The main trouble was still the struggle, though often a blind 



938 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and misdirected struggle, of the interests of ordinary men 
against the Great Power system which cramped and oppressed 
the life of mankind. 

But after 1848, from 1848 to 1914, though the readjust- 
ment of the map still went on towards a free and unified Italy 
and a unified Germany, there began a fresh phase in the process 
of mental and political adaptation to the new knowledge and 
the new material powers of mankind. Came a great irruption 
of new social, religious, and political ideas into the general 
European mind. In the next three sections we will consider 
the origin and quality of these irruptions. They laid the 
foundations upon which we base our political thought to-day, 
but for a long time they had no very great effect on contempo- 
rary politics. Contemporary politics continued to run on in 
the old lines, but with a steadily diminishing support in the 
intellectual convictions and consciences of men. We have al- 
ready described the way in which a strong intellectual process 
undennined the system of Grand Monarchy in France before 
1789. A similar undermining process was going on throughout 
Europe during the Great Power period of 1848-1914. Pro- 
found doubts of the system of government and of the liberties 
of many -forms of property in the economic system spread 
throughout the social body. Then came the greatest and most 
disorganizing war in history, so that it is still impossible to 
estimate the power and range of the accumulated new ideas 
of those sixty-six years. We have been through a greater 
catastrophe even than the Napoleonic catastrophe, and we are 
in a slack-water period, corresponding to the period 1815-30. 
Our 18-30 and our 1848 are still to come and show us where 
we stand. 



We have traced throughout this history the gradual restric- 
tion of the idea of property from the first unlimited claim of 
the strong man to possess everything and the gradual realiza- 
tion of brotherhood as something transcending personal self- 
seeking. Men were first subjugated into more than tribal 
societies by the fear of monarch and deity. It is only within 
the last three or at most four thousand years that we have any 
clear evidence that voluntary self-abandonment to some greater 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 939 

end, without fee or reward, was an acceptable idea to men, 
or that anyone had propounded it. Then we find spreading 
over the surface of human afi'airs, as patches of sunshine spread 
and pass over the hillsides upon a windy day in spring, the idea 
that there is a happiness in self-devotion greater than any per- 
sonal gratification or triumph, and a life of mankind diti'erent 
and greater and more important than the sum of all the in- 
dividual lives within it. We have seen that idea become vivid 
as a beacon, vivid as sunshine caught and reflected dazzlingly by 
some window in the landscape, in the teachings of Buddha, Lao 
Tse, and, most clearly of all, of Jesus of Nazareth. Through 
all its variations and corruptions Christianity has never com- 
pletely lost the suggestion of a devotion to God's commonweal 
that makes the personal pomps of monarchs and rulers seem 
like the insolence of an overdressed servant and the splendours 
and gratifications of wealth like the waste of robbers. No man 
living in a community which such a religion as Christianity or 
Islam has touched can be altogether a slave ; there is an ineradi- 
cable quality in these religions that compels men to judge their 
masters and to realize their own responsibility for the world. 
As men have felt their way towards this new state of mind 
from the fierce self-centred greed and instinctive combative- 
ness of the early palaeolithic family group, they have sought 
to express the drift of their thoughts and necessities very vari- 
ously. They have found themselves in disagreement and con- 
flict with old-established ideas, and there has been a natural 
tendency to contradict these ideas flatly, to fly over to the abso- 
lute contrary. Faced by a world in which rule and classes and 
order seem to do little but give opportunity for personal self- 
ishness and unrighteous oppression, the first impatient move- 
ment was to declare for a universal equality and a practical 
anarchy. Faced by a world in which property seemed little 
more than a protection for selfishness and a method of enslave- 
ment, it was as natural to repudiate all property. Our history 
shows an increasing impulse to revolt against rulers and against 
ownership. We have traced it in the middle ages burning the 
rich man's chateaux and experimenting in theocracy and com- 
munism. In the French revolutions this double revolt is clear 
and plain. In France we find side by side, inspired by the 
same spirit and as natural parts of the same revolutionary 
movement, men who, with their eyes on the ruler's taxes, de- 



940 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

clared that property should be inviolable, and others who, with 
their eyes on the employer's hard bargains, declared that prop- 
erty should be abolished. But what they are really revolting 
against in each case is that the ruler and the employer, instead 
of becoming servants of the community, still remain, like most 
of mankind, self-seeking, oppressive individuals. 

Throughout the ages we find this belief growing in men's 
minds that there can be such a rearrangement of laws and pow- 
ers as to give rule and order while still restraining the egotism 
of any ruler and of any ruling class that may be necessary, and 
such a definition of property as will give freedom without 
oppressive power. We begin to realize nowadays that these ends 
are only to be attained by a complex constructive effort; they 
arise through the conflict of new human needs against igno- 
rance and old human nature ; but throughout the nineteenth 
century there was a persistent disposition to solve the problem 
by some simple formula. (And be happy ever afterwards, re- 
gardless of the fact that all human life, all life, is throughout 
the ages nothing but the continuing solution of a continuous 
synthetic problem.) 

The earlier half of the nineteenth century saw a number of 
experiments in the formation of trial human societies of a new 
kind. Among the most important historically were the experi- 
ments and ideas of Kobert Owen (1771-1858), a Manchester 
cotton-spinner. He is very generally regarded as the founder 
of modem Socialism ; it was in connection with his work that 
the word "socialism" first arose (about 1835). 

He seems to have been a thoroughly competent business man ; 
he made a number of innovations in the cotton-spinning indus- 
try, and acquired a fair fortune at an early age. He was dis- 
tressed by the waste of human possibilities among his workers, 
and he set himself to improve their condition and the relations 
of employer and employed. This he sought to do first at his 
Manchester factory and afterwards at l^ew Lanark, where he 
found himself in practical control of works employing about 
two thousand people. Between 1800 and 1828 he achieved 
very considerable things : he reduced the hours of labour, made 
his factory sanitary and agreeable, abolished the employment 
of very young children, improved the training of his workers, 
provided unemplojTnent pay during a period of trade depres- 
sion, established a system of schools, and made New Lanark 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 941 

a model of better industrialism, while at the same time sus- 
taining its commercial prosperity. He wrote vigorously to 
defend the mass of mankind against the charges of intemperance 
and improvidence which were held to justify the economic in- 
iquities of the time. He held that men and women are largely 
the product of their educational environment, a thesis that 
needs no advocacy to-day. And he set himself to a propaganda 
of the views that Xew Lanark had justified. He attacked the 
selfish idolence of his fellow manufacturers, and in 1819, largely 
under his urgency, the first Factory Act was passed, the first 
attempt to restrain employers from taking the most stupid and 
intolerable advantages of their workers' poverty. Some of the 
restrictions of that Act amaze us to-day. It seems incredible 
now that it should ever have been necessary to protect little 
children of nt??e ( !) from work in factories, or to limit the 
nominal working day of such employees to twelve hours! 

People are perhaps too apt to write of the industrial revolu- 
tion as though it led to the enslavement and overworking of 
poor children who had hitherto been happy and free. But this 
misinterprets history. From the very beginnings of civiliza- 
tion the little children of the poor had always been obliged to 
do whatever work they could do. But the factory system gath- 
ered up all this infantile toil and made it systematic, conspic- 
uous, and scandalous. The factory system challenged the quick- 
ening human conscience on that issue. The British Factory 
Act of 1819, weak and feeble though it seems to us, was the 
Magna Carta of childhood ; thereafter the protection of the chil- 
dren of the poor, first from toil and then from bodily starvation 
and ignorance, began. 

We cannot tell here in any detail the full story of Owen's 
life and thought. His work at New Lanark had been, he felt, 
only a trial upon a small working model. What could be done 
for one industrial community could be done, he held, for every 
industrial community in the country; he advocated a resettle- 
ment of the industrial population in townships on the New 
Lanark plan. For a time he seemed to have captured the imag- 
ination of the world. The Times and Morning Post supported 
his proposals; among the visitors to New Lanark was the 
Grand Duke Nicholas who succeeded Alexander I as Tsar; 
a fast friend was the Duke of Kent, son of George III and 
father of Queen Victoria. But all the haters of change and 



942 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

all — and there are always many such — who were jealous of 
the poor, and all the employers who were likely to be troubled 
by his projects, were waiting for an excuse to counter-attack 
him, and they found it in the expression of his religious opin- 
ions, which were hostile to official Christianity, and through 
those he was successfully discredited. But he continued to 
develop his projects and experiments, of which the chief was 
a community at New Harmony in Indiana (U.S.A.), in which 
he sank most of his capital. His partners bought him out 
of the New Lanark business in 1828. 

Owen's experiments and suggestions ranged very widely, and 
do not fall under any single formula. There was nothing doc- 
trinaire about him. His New Lanark experiment was the first 
of a number of "benevolent businesses" in the world; Lord 
Leverhulme's Port Sunlight, the Cadburys' Bournville, and the 
Ford businesses in America are contemporary instances ; it was 
not really a socialist experiment at all ; it was a "paternal" 
experiment. But his proposals for state settlements were what 
we should call state socialism to-day. His American experi- 
ment and his later writings point to a completer form of social- 
ism, a much wider departure from the existing state of aifairs. 
It is clear that the riddle of currency exercised Owen. He 
imderstood that we can no more hope for real economic justice 
while we pay for work with money of fluctuating value than 
we could hope for a punctual world if the^e was a continual 
inconstant variability in the length of an hour. One of his 
experiments was an attempt at a circulation of labour notes rep- 
resenting one hour, five hours, or twenty hours of work. The 
co-operative societies of to-day, societies of poor men which 
combine for the collective buying and distribution of commodi- 
ties or for collective manufacture or dairying or other forms of 
agriculture, arose directly out of his initiatives, though the 
pioneer co-operative societies of his own time ended in failure. 
Their successors have spread throughout the whole world, and 
number to-day some thirty or forty million of adherents. 

A point to note about this early socialism of Owen's is that 
it was not at first at all "democratic." Its initiative was benevo- 
lent, its early form patriarchal; it was something up to which 
the workers were to be educated by liberally disposed employ- 
ers and leaders. The first socialism was not a worker's move- 
ment ; it was a master's movement. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 943 

Concurrently with this work of Owen's, another and quite 
independent series of developments was going on in America 
and Britain which was destined to come at last into reaction 
with his socialistic ideas. The English law had long prohib- 
ited combinations in restraint of trade, combinations to raise 
prices or wages by concerted action. There had been no great 
hardship in these prohibitions before the agrarian and indus- 
trial changes of the eighteenth century let loose a great swann 
of workers living from hand to mouth and competing for in- 
sufficient employment. Under these new conditions, the workers 
in many industries found themselves intolerably squeezed. They 
were played off one against another ; day by day and hour by 
hour none knew what concession his fellow might not have 
made, and what further reduction of pay or increase of toil 
might not ensue. It became vitally necessary for the workers to 
make agreements — illegal though they were — against such un- 
derselling. At first these agreements had to be made and sus- 
tained by secret societies. Or clubs, established ostensibly for 
quite other purposes, social clubs, funeral societies, and the like, 
served to mask the wage-protecting combination. The fact that 
these associations were illegal disposed them to violence ; they 
were savage against "blacklegs" and "rats" who would not join 
them, and still more savage with traitors. In 1824 the House 
of Commons recogTiized the desirability of relieving tension in 
these matters by conceding the right of workmen to form com- 
binations for "collective bargaining" with the masters. This 
enabled Trade Unions to develop with a large measure of free- 
dom. At first very clumsy and primitive organizations and 
with very restricted freedoms, the Trade Unions have risen 
gradually to be a real Fourth Estate in the country, a great 
system of bodies representing the mass of industrial workers. 

Arising at first in Britain and America, they have, with 
various national modifications, and under varying legal condi- 
tions, spread to France, Gennany, and all the westernized 
communities. 

Organized originally to sustain wages and restrict intolerable 
hours, the Trade Union movement was at first something alto- 
gether distinct from socialism. The Trade Unionist tried to 
make the best for himself of the existing capitalism and the ex- 
isting conditions of employment ; the socialist proposed to change 
the system. It was the imagination and generalizing power of 



944 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Karl Marx which brought these two movements into relation- 
ship. He was a man with the sense of history very strong in 
him ; he was the first to perceive that the old social classes that 
had endured since the beginning of civilization were in process 
of dissolution and regrouping. His racial Jewish commercial- 
ism made the antagonism of property and labour very plain to 
him. And his upbringing in Germany — where, as we have 
pointed out, the tendency of class to harden into caste was more 
evident than in any other European country — made him con- 
ceive of labour as presently becoming ''class conscious" and 
collectively antagonistic to the property-concentrating classes. 
In the Trade Union movement which was spreading over the 
world, he believed he saw this development of class-conscious 
labour. 

What, he asked, would be the outcome of the "class war" of 
the capitalist and proletariat ? The capitalist adventurers, he 
alleged, because of their inherent greed and combativeness, 
would gather power over capital into fewer and fewer hands, 
until at last they would concentrate all the means of production, 
transit, and the like into a form seizable by the workers, whose 
class consciousness and solidarity would be developed pari passu 
by the process of organizing and concentrating industry. They 
would seize this capital and work it for themselves. This 
would be the social revolution. Then individual property and 
freedom would be restored, based upon the common ownership 
of the earth and the management by the community as a whole 
of the great productive services which the private capitalist 
had organized and concentrated. This would be the end of the 
"capitalist" system, but not the end of the system of capitalism. 
State capitalism would replace private owner capitalism. 

This marks a great stride away from the socialism of Owen. 
Owen (like Plato) looked to the common sense of men of any 
or every class to reorganize the casual and faulty political, 
economic, and social structure. Marx found something more 
in the nature of a driving force in his class hostility based 
on expropriation and injustice. And he was not simply a 
prophetic theorist ; he was also a propagandist of the revolt of 
labour, the revolt of the so-called "proletariat." Labour, he 
perceived, had a common interest against the capitalist every- 
where, though under the test of the Great Power wars of the 
time, and particularly of the liberation of Italy, he showed that 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 945 

he failed to grasp the fact that labour everywhere has a common 
interest in the peace of the world. But with the social revolution 
in view he did succeed in inspiring the formation of an inter- 
national league of workers, the First International. 

The subsequent history ol socialism is chequered between the 
British tradition of Owen and the German class feeling of Marx. 
What is called Fabian Socialism, the exposition of socialism 
by the London Fabian Society, makes its appeal to reasonable 
men of all classes. What are called "Revisionists" in Gennan 
Socialism incline in the same direction. But on the whole, it 
is Marx who has carried the day against Owen, and the gen- 
eral disposition of socialists throughout the world is to look 
to the organization of labour and labour only to supply the 
fighting forces that will disentangle the political and economic or- 
ganization of human affairs from the hands of the more or less 
irresponsible private owners and adventurers who now con- 
trol it. 

These are the broad features of the project which is called 
Socialism. We will discuss its incompletenesses and inade- 
quacies in our next section. It was perhaps inevitable that 
socialism should be greatly distraught and subdivided by doubts 
and disputes and sects and schools ; they are growth symptoms 
like the spots on a youth's face. Here we can but glance at 
the difference between state socialism, which would run the 
economic business of the country through its political govern- 
ment, and the newer schools of syndicalism and guild socialism 
which would entrust a large measure in the government of each 
industry to the workers of every grade — including the directors 
and managers — engaged in that industry. This "giiild social- 
ism" is really a new sort of capitalism with a committee of 
workers and officials in each industry taking the place of the 
free private capitalists of that industry. The personnel becomes 
the collective capitalist. Nor can we discuss the undemocratic 
idea of the Russian leader Lenin, that a population cannot 
judge of socialism before it has experienced it, and that a group 
of socialists are thergfore justified in seizing and socializing, 
if they can, the life of a country without at first setting up any 
democratic form of general government at all, for which sort 
of seizure, he uses the Marxian phrase, a very imcompetent 
phrase, the "dictatorship of the proletariat." 

All Russia now is a huge experiment in that dictatorship. 



946 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The "proletariat" is supposed to be dictating the government 
of Russia through committees of workmen and soldiers, the 
Soviets, but as a matter of fact these Soviets have little or no 
real directive power. They assemble in meetings so big as 
to be practically mass meetings, and the utmost they can do is 
to give a general assent to the proceedings of the government. 
The Petersburg Soviet, which the writer visited in September, 
1920, was a mass meeting of over three thousand people, in 
capable of any detailed criticism or direction of the Bolshevik 
government.^ 



We are all socialists nowadays, said Sir William Harcourt 
years ago, and that is loosely true to-day. There can be few 
people who fail to realize the provisional nature and the dan- 
gerous instability of our present political and economic system, 
and still fewer who believe with the doctrinaire individualists 
that profit-hunting "go as you please" will guide mankind to 
any haven of prosperity and happiness. Great rearrangements 
are necessary, and a systematic legal subordination of personal 
self-seeking to the public good. So far most reasonable men are 
socialists. But these are only preliminary propositions. How 
far has socialism and modern thought generally gone towards 
working out the conception of this new political and social order, 
of which our world admittedly stands in need ? We are obliged 
to answer that there is no clear conception of the new state to- 
wards which we vaguely struggle, that our science of human 
relationships is still so crude and speculative as to leave us with- 
out definite guidance upon a score of primarily important issues. 
In 1920 we are no more in a position to set up a scientifically 
conceived political system in the world than were men to set 
up an electric power station in 1820. They could not have done 
that then to save their lives. 

The IMarxist system points us to an accumulation of revolu- 
tionary forces in the modem world. These forces will continu- 
ally tend towards revolution. But Marx assumed too hastily 
that a revolutionary impulse would necessarily produce an 
ordered state of a new and better kind. A revolution may stop 
half-way in mere destruction, ^o socialist sect has yet defined 

* Wells, Russia in the Shadows. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 947 

its projected government clearly; the Bolsheviks in their Rus- 
sian experiment seem to have been guided by a phrase, the dic- 
tatorship of the proletariat, and in practice, we are told, Trotsky 
and Lenin have proved as autocratic as the less intelligent but 
equally well-meaning Tsar, Alexander I. We have been at 
some pains to show from our brief study of the French revolu- 
tion that a revolution can establish nothing permanent that 
has not already been thought out beforehand and apprehended 
by the general mind. The French republic, confronted with 
unexpected difficulties in economics, currency, and international 
relationships, collapsed to the egotisms of the newly rich people 
of the Directory, and finally to the egotism of Napoleon. Law 
and a plan, steadily upheld, are more necessary in revolutionary 
times than in ordinary humdrum times, because in revolution- 
ary times society degenerates much more readily into a mere 
scramble under the ascendancy of the forcible and cunning. 

If in general terms we take stock of the political and social 
science of our age, we shall measure sometliing of the prelimi- 
nary intellectual task still to be done by mankind before we 
can hope to see any permanent constructive achievements emerg- 
ing from the mere traditionalism and adventuring that rule 
our collective affairs to-day. This Socialism, which professes 
to be a complete theory of a new social order, we discover, when 
we look into it, to be no more than a partial theory — very 
illuminating, so far as it goes — about property. We have already 
discussed the relationship of social development to the restric- 
tion of the idea of property. There are various schools of 
thought which would restrict property more or less completely. 
Communism is the proposal to abolish property altogether, or, 
in other words, to hold all things in common. Modern Social- 
ism, on the other hand — or, to give it a more precise name, 
"Collectivism" — does clearly distinguish between personal prop- 
erty and collective property. The gist of the socialist proposal 
is that land and all the natural means of production, transit, 
and distribution should be collectively owned. Within these 
limits there is to be much free private ownership and unre- 
stricted personal freedom. Given efficient administration, it 
may be doubted whether many people nowadays would dispute 
that proposal. But socialism has never gone on to a thorough 
examination of that proviso for efficient administration. 

Again, what community is it that is to own the collective 



948 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

property ; is it to be the sovereign or tiie township or the county 
or the nation or mankind ? Socialism makes no clear answer. 
Socialists are very free with the word ''nationalize," but we 
have been subjecting the ideas of "nations" and "nationalism" 
to some destructive criticism in this Outline. If socialists 
object to a single individual claiming a mine or a great stretch 
of agi'icultural land as his own individual property, with a 
right to refuse or barter its use and profit to others, why 
should they permit a single nation to monopolize the mines 
or trade routes or natural wealth of the territories in which 
it lives, against the rest of mankind ? There seems to be great 
confusion in socialist theory in this matter. And unless human 
life is to become a mass meeting of the race in permanent ses- 
sion, how is the community to appoint its officers to carry on 
its collective concerns ? After all, the private owner of land or 
of a business or the like is a sort of public official in so far as 
his ownership is sanctioned and protected by the community. 
Instead of being paid a salary or fees, he is allowed to make a 
profit. The only valid reason for dismissing him from his own- 
ership is that the new control to be substituted will be more 
efficient and profitable and satisfactory to the community. And, 
being dismissed, he has at least the same claim to consideration 
from the community that he himself has shown in the past 
to the worker thrown out of employment by a mechanical 
invention. 

This question of administration, the sound and adequate bar 
to much immediate socialization, brings us to the still largely 
unsolved problem of human association; how are we to secure 
the best direction of human affairs and the maximum of will- 
ing co-operation with that direction ? This is ultimately a 
complex problem in psychology, but it is absurd to pretend 
that it is an insoluble one. There must be a definite best, which 
is the right thing, in these matters. But if it is not insoluble, 
it is equally unreasonable to pretend that it has been solved. 
The problem in its completeness involves the working out of the 
best methods in the following departments, and their complete 
correlation : — 

(i) Education. — The preparation of the individual for an 
understanding and willing co-operation in the world's affairs. 

(ii) Information. — The continual truthful presentation of 
public affairs to the individual for his judgment and approval. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 949 

Closely connected with this need for current information is 
the codification of the law, the problem of keeping the law plain, 
clear, and accessible to all. 

(iii) Bepresentation. — The selection of representatives and 
agents to act in the collective interest in harmony with the 
general will based on this education and plain information. 

(iv) The Executive. — The appointment of executive agents 
and the maintenance of means for keeping them responsible 
to tbe community, without at the same time hampering intelli- 
gent initiatives. 

(v) Thought and Research. — The systematic criticism of af- 
fairs and laws to provide data for popular judgments, and 
through those judgments to ensure the secular improvement 
of the human organization. 

These are the five heads under which the broad problem of 
human society presents itself to us. In the world around us 
we see makeshift devices at work in all those branches, ill co- 
ordinated one with another and unsatisfactory in themselves. 
We see an educational system meanly financed and equipped, 
badly organized and crippled by the interventions and hostilities 
of religious bodies ; we see popular information supplied chiefly 
by a venal press dependant upon advertisements and subsidies ; 
we see farcical methods of election returning politicians to 
power as unrepresentative as any hereditary ruler or casual 
conqueror ; everywhere the executive is more or less influenced 
or controlled by groups of rich adventurers, and the pursuit of 
political and social science and of public criticism is still the 
work of devoted and eccentric individuals rather than a recog- 
nized and honoured function in the state. There is a gigantic 
task before right-thinking men in the cleansing and sweetening 
of the politician's stable; and until it is done, any complete 
realization of socialism is impossible. While private adven- 
turers control the political life of the state, it is ridiculous to 
think of the state taking over collective economic interests from 
private adventurers. 

Not only has the socialist movement failed thus far to pro- 
duce a scientifically reasoned scheme for the correlation of edu- 
cation, law, and the exercise of public power, but even in the 
economic field, as we have already pointed out, creative forces 
wait for the conception of a right organization of credit and a 
right method of payment and interchange. It is a truism that 



950 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the willingness of the worker depends, among other things, 
upon his complete confidence in the purchasing power of the 
currency in which he is paid. As this confidence goes, work 
ceases, except in so far as it can be rewarded by payment in 
goods. But there is no sufficient science of currency and busi- 
ness psychology to restrain governments from the most disturb- 
ing interferences with the public credit and with the circulation. 
And such interferences lead straight to the cessation of work, 
that is, of the production of necessary things. Upon such vital 
practical questions it is scarcely too much to say that the mass 
of those socialists who would recast the world have no definite 
ideas at all. Yet in a socialist world quite as much as in any 
other sort of world, people must be paid money for their work 
rather than be paid in kind if any such thing as personal free- 
dom is to continue. Here, too, there must be an ascertainable 
right thing to do. Until that is determined, history in these 
matters will continue to be not so much a record of experiments 
as of flounderings. 

And in another direction the social and political thinking 
of the nineteenth century was, in the face of the vastness of the 
mechanical revolution, timid, limited, and insufficient, and that 
was in regard to international relations. The reader of social- 
istic literature will find the socialists constantly writing and 
talking of the "State," and never betraying any realization 
that the "State" might be all sorts of organizations in all sorts 
of areas, from the republic of San Marino to the British Em- 
pire. It is true that Karl Marx had a conception of a solidarity 
of interests between the workers in all the industrialized coun- 
tries, but there is little or no suggestion in Marxist socialism 
of the logical corollary of this, the establishment of a demo- 
cratic world federal government (with national or provincial 
"state" governments) as a natural consequence of his projected 
social revolution. At most there is a vague aspiration. But if 
there is any logic about the Marxist, it should be his declared 
political end for which he should work without ceasing. Put 
to the test of the war of 1914, the socialists of almost all the 
European countries showed that their class-conscious interna- 
tionalism was veneered very thinly indeed over their patriotic 
feelings, and had to no degree replaced them. Everywhere 
during the German war socialists denounced that war as made 
by capitalist governments, bvit it produces little or no perma- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 951 

nent effect to denounce a government or a world system unless 
you have a working idea of a better government and a better 
system to replace it. 

We state these things here because they are facts, and a living 
and necessary part of a contemporary survey of human history. 
It is not our task either to advocate or controvert socialism. 
But it is in our picture to note that political and social life 
are, and must remain, chaotic and disastrous without the devel- 
opment of some such constructive scheme as socialism sketches, 
and to point out clearly how far away the world is at present 
from any such scheme. An enormous amount of intellectual 
toil and discussion and education and many years — whether 
decades or centuries, no man can tell — must intervene before a 
new order, planned as ships and railways are planned, runs, as 
the cables and the postal deliveries run, over the whole surface 
of our earth. And until such a new order draws mankind to- 
gether with its net, human life, as we shall presently show by 
the story of the European wars since 1854, must become more 
and more casual, dangerous, miserable, anxious, and disastrous 
because of the continually more powerful and destructive war 
methods the continuing mechanical revolution produces. 



While the mechanical revolution which the growth of phys- 
ical science had brought about was destroying the ancient social 
classification of the civilized state which had been evolved 
through thousands of years, and producing new possibilities and 
new ideals of a righteous human community and a righteous 
world order, a change at least as great and novel was going on 
in the field of religious thought. That same growth of scien- 
tific knowledge from which sprang the mechanical revolution 
was the moving cause of these religious disturbances. 

In the opening chapters of this Outline we have given the 
main story of the Record of the Rocks ; we have shown life for 
the little beginning of consciousness that it is in the still wait- 
ing vastness of the void of space and time. But before the 
end of the eighteenth century, this enormous prospect of the 

* For a closely parallel view of religion to that given here, see Outspoken 
Essays, by Dean Inge, Essays VIII and IX on St. Paul and on Instiiu- 
tionalism and Mysticism. 



952 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

past which fills a modem jnind with humility and illimitable 
hope was hidden from the general consciousness of our race. 
It was veiled by the curtain of a Sumerian legend. The heavens 
were no more than a stage background to a little drama of 
kings. Men had been too occupied with their own private pas- 
sions and personal affairs to heed the intimations of their own 
gTeat destiny that lay about them everywhere. 

They learnt their true position in space long before they 
placed themselves in time. We have already named the earlier 
astronomers, and told how Galileo was made to recant his as- 
sertion that the earth moved round the sun. He was made 
to do so by the church, and the church was stirred to make him 
do so because any doubt that the world was the centre of the 
universe seemed to strike fatally at the authority of Christianity. 

Now, upon that matter the teller of modern history is obliged 
to be at once cautious and bold. He has to pick his way be- 
tween cowardly evasion on the one hand, and partisanship on 
the other. As far as possible he must confine himself to facts 
and restrain his opinions. Yet it is well to remember, that no 
opinions can be altogether restrained. The writer has his own 
very strong and definite persuasions, and the reader must bear 
that in mind. It is a fact in history that the teaching of Jesus 
of Nazareth had in it something profoundly new and creative; 
he preached a new Kingdom of Heaven in the hearts and in the 
world of men. There was nothing in his teaching, so far as 
we can judge it at this distance of time, to clash or interfere 
with any discovery or expansion of the history of the world 
and mankind. But it is equally a fact in history that St. Paul 
and his successors added to or completed or imposed upon or 
substituted another doctrine for — as you may prefer to think — - 
the plain and profoundly revolutionary teachings of Jesus by 
expounding a subtle and complex theory of salvation, a salva- 
tion which could be attained very largely by belief and formali- 
ties, without any serious disturbance of the believer's ordinary 
habits and occupations, and that this Pauline teaching did 
involve very definite beliefs about the history of the world and 
man. It is not the business of the historian to controvert, or 
explain these matters; the question of their ultimate signifi- 
cance depends upon the theologian; the historian's concern is 
merely with the fact that official Christianity throughout the 
world adopted St. Paul's view so plainly expressed in his epis- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 953 

ties and so untraceable in the gospels, tliat the meaning of 
religion lay not in the future, but in the past, and that Jesus 
was not so much a teacher of wonderful new things, as a pre- 
destinate divine blood sacrifice of deep mystery and sacredness 
made in atonement of a particular historical act of disobedience 
to the Creator committed by our first parents, Adam and Eve, 
in response to the temptation of a serpent in the Garden of 
Eden. Upon the belief in that Fall as a fact, and not upon 
the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, upon the theories of Paul, 
and not upon the injunctions of Jesus, doctrinal Christianity 
built itself. 

We have already noted that this story of the special creation 
of the world and of Adam and Eve and the serpent was also 
an ancient Babylonian story, and probably a still more ancient 
Sumerian story, and that the Jewish sacred books were the 
medium by which this very ancient and primitive *'heliolithic" 
serpent legend entered Christianity. Wherever official Chris- 
tianity has gone, it has taken this story with it. It has tied it- 
self up to that story. Until a century and less ago the whole 
Christianized world felt bound to believe and did believe, that 
the universe had been specially created in the course of six days 
by the word of God a few thousand years before^ — according 
to Bishop ITssher, 4004 b.c. (The Universal History, in forty- 
two volumes, published in 1779 by a group of London book- 
sellers, discusses whether the precise date of the first day of 
Creation was March 21st or September 21st, 4004 b.c, and 
inclines to the view that the latter was the more probable 
season. ) 

Upon this historical assumption rested the religious fabric 
of the Western and Westernized civilization, and yet the whole 
world was littered, the hills, mountains, deltas, and seas 
were bursting with evidence of its utter absurdity. The re- 
ligious life of the leading nations, still a very intense and sin- 
cere religious life, was going on in a house of history built 
upon sand. 

There is frequent recognition in classical literature of a 
sounder cosmogony. Aristotle was aware of the broad princi- 
ples of modern geology, they shine through the speculations of 
Lucretius, and we have noted also Leonardo da Vinci's (1452- 
1519) lucid interpretation of fossils. A Frenchman, Descartes 
(1696-1650), speculated boldly upon the incandescent begin- 



954 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

nings of our globe, and a Dane, Steno (1631-87), began the 
collection of fossils and the description of strata. But it was 
only as the eighteenth century drew to its close that the syste- 
matic study of geology assumed such proportions as to affect 
the general authority of the Bible version of that ancient 
Sumerian narrative. Contemporaneously with the Universal 
History quoted above, a great French naturalist, Buffon, was 
writing upon the Epochs of Nature (1778), and boldly extend- 
ing the age of the world to 70,000 or 75,000 years. He divided 
his story into six. epochs to square with the six days of the Crea- 
tion story. These days, it was argued, were figurative days; 
they were really ages. There was a general disposition to do 
this on the part of the new science of geology. By that accom- 
modating device, geology contrived to make a peace with ortho- 
dox religious teaching that lasted until the middle of the nine- 
teenth century. 

We cannot trace here the contributions of such men as Hut- 
ton and Playfair and Sir Charles Lyell, and the Frenchmen 
Lamarck and Cuvier, in unfolding and developing the record 
of the rocks. It was only slowly that the general intelligence 
of the Western world was awakened to two disconcerting facts : 
firstly, that the succession of life in the geological record did 
not correspond to the acts of the six days of creation ; and, 
secondly, 'that the record, in hai-mony with a mass of biological 
facts, pointed away from the Bible assertion of a separate crea- 
tion of each species straight towards a genetic relation between 
all forms of life, in which even man was included! The im- 
portance of this last issue to the existing doctrinal system was 
manifest. If all the animals and man had been evolved in this 
ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, 
and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire 
historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and 
the reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching 
based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house 
of cards. 

It was with something like horror, therefore, that great 
numbers of honest and religious-spirited men followed the work 
of the English naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-82); in 
1859 he published his Origin of Species by Meaiis of Natural 
Selection, a powerful and permanently valuable exposition of 
that conception of the change and development of species which 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 955 

we have sketched briefly in Chapter III; and in 1871 he com- 
pleted the outline of his work with the Descent of Alan, which 
brought man definitely into the same scheme of development 
with the rest of life. 

Many men and women are still living who can remember 
the dismay and distress among ordinary intelligent people in the 
Western communities as the invincible case of the biologists 
and geologists against the orthodox Christian cosmogony un- 
folded itself. The minds of many resisted the new knowledge 
instinctively and irrationally. Their whole moral edifice was 
built upon false history ; they were too old and set to rebuild 
it; they felt the practical truth of their moral convictions, and 
this new truth seemed to them to be incompatible with that. 
They believed that to assent to it would be to prepare a moral 
collapse for the world. And so they produced a moral collapse 
by not assenting to it. The universities in England particu- 
larly, being primarily clerical in their constitution, resisted the 
new learning very bitterly. During the seventies and eighties 
a stormy controversy raged throughout the civilized world. 
The quality of the discussions and the fatal ignorance of the 
church may be gauged by a description in Hackett's Common- 
place Book of a meeting of the British Association in I860, at 
which Bishop Wilberforce assailed Huxley, the great champion 
of the Darwinian views, in this fashion. 

Facing "Huxley with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, 
iras it through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed 
his descent from a monkey f Huxley turned to his neighbour, 
and said, 'The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.' Then 
he stood before us and spoke these tremendous words, 'He 
was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he 
would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great 
gifts to obscure the truth.'" (Another version has it: 'T 
have certainly said that a man has no reason to be ashamed 
of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor 
whom I should feel ashamed in recalling, it would rather be 
a man of restless and versatile intellect who plunges into scien- 
tific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to 
obscure them by an aimless rhetoric and distract the attention 
of his audience from the real point at issue by eloquent di- 
gressions and skilled appeals to prejudice.") ■ These words 
were certainly spoken with passion. The scene was one of 



956 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

great excitement. A ladj fainted, says Hackett. . . . Such 
was the temper of this controversy. 

The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity una- 
wares, suddenly. Formal Christianity was confronted with a 
clearly demonstrable error in her theological statements. The 
Christian theologians were neither wise enough nor mentally 
nimble enough to accept the new truth, modify their formula, 
and insist upon the living and undiminished vitality of the 
religious reality those formulae had hitherto sufficed to express. 
For the discoveiy of man's descent from sub-human forms does 
not even remotely touch the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. 
Yet priests and bishops raged at Darwin ; foolish attempts were 
made to suppress Darwinian literature and to insult and dis- 
credit the exponents of the new views. There was much wild 
talk of the '^antagonism" of religion and science. Now in all 
ages there have been sceptics in Christendom. The Emperor 
Frederick II was certainly a sceptic ; in the eighteenth century 
Gibbon and Voltaire were openly anti-Christian, and their writ- 
ings influenced a number of scattered readers. But these were 
exceptional people. . . . Now the whole of Christendom became 
as a whole sceptical. This new controversy touched everybody 
who read a book or heard intelligent conversation. A new 
generation of young people grew up, and they found the de- 
fenders of Christianity in an evil temper, fighting their cause 
without dignity or fairness. It was the orthodox theology that 
the new scientific advances had compromised, but the angry 
theologians declared that it was religion. 

In the end men may discover that religion shines all the 
brighter for the loss of its doctrinal wrappings, but to the young 
it seemed as if indeed there had been a conflict of science and 
religion, and that in that conflict science had won. 

The immediate effect of this great dispute upon the ideas 
and methods of people in the prosperous and influential classes 
throughout the westernized world was very detrimental indeed. 
The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive 
as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moraliza- 
tion ensued. The general level of social life in those classes 
was far higher in the early twentieth than in the early seven- 
teenth century, but in one respect, in respect to disinterested- 
ness and conscientiousness in these classes, it is probable that 
the tone of the earlier age was better than the latter. In the 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 95? 

owning and active classes of the seventeenth century, in spite 
of a few definite "infidels," there was probably a much higher 
percentage of men and women who prayed sincerely, who 
searched their souls to find if they had done evil, and who were 
prepared to suffer and make great sacrifices for what they con- 
ceived to be right, than in the opening years of the twentieth 
century. There was a real loss of faith after 1859. The true 
gold of religion was in many cases thrown away with the 
worn-out purse that had contained it for so long, and it was not 
recovered. Towards the close of the nineteenth century a crude 
misunderstanding of Darwinism had become the fundamental 
mindstuff of great masses of the "educated" everywhere. The 
seventeenth-century kings and owners and rulers and leaders had 
had the idea at the back of their minds that they prevailed by 
the will of God ; they really feared him, they got priests to put 
things right for them with him ; when they were wicked, they 
tried not to think of him. But the old faith of the kings, own- 
ers, and rulers of the opening twentieth century had faded 
under the actinic light of scientific criticism. Prevalent peo- 
ples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they 
prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the 
strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. 
And they believed further that they had to be strong, energetic, 
ruthless, "practical," egotistical, because God was dead, and had 
always, it seemed, been dead — which was going altogether 
further than the new knowledge justified. 

They soon got beyond the first crude popular misconeeption 
of Darwinism, the idea that every man is for himself alone. 
But they stuck at the next level. Man, they decided, is a social 
animal like the Indian hunting dog. He is much more than a 
dog — but this they did not see. And just as in a pack it is 
necessary to bully and subdue the yovmger and weaker for the 
general good, so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the 
human pack should bully and subdue. Hence a new scorn for 
the ideas of democracy that had ruled the earlier nineteenth 
century, and a revived admiration for the overbearing and the 
cruel. It was quite characteristic of the times that Mr. Kipling 
should lead the children of the middle and upper-class British 
public back to the Jungle, to learn "the law," and that in his 
book Stalky and, Co. he should give an appreciative description 
of the torture of two boys by three others, who have by a sub- 



058 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

terfuge tied up their victims helplessly before revealing their 
hostile intentions. 

It is worth while to give a little attention to this incident in 
Stalky and Co., because it lights up the political psychology of 
the British Empire at the close of the nineteenth century very 
vividly. The history of the last half century is not to be under- 
stood without an understanding of the mental twist which this 
story exemplifies. The two boys who are tortured are "bullies," 
that is the excuse of their tormentors, and these latter have 
further been incited to the orgy by a clergyman. Nothing can 
restrain the gusto with which they (and Mr. Kipling) set 
about the job. Before resorting to torture, the teaching seems 
to be, see that you pump up a little justifiable moral indigna- 
tion, and all will be well. If you have the authorities on your 
side, then you cannot be to blame. Such, apparently, is the 
simple doctrine of this typical imperialist. But every bully 
has to the best of his ability followed that doctrine since the 
human animal developed sufficient intelligence to be consciously 
cruel. 

Another point in the story is very significant indeed. The 
head master and his clerical assistant are both represented as 
being privy to the affair. They want this bullying to occur. 
Instead of exercising their own authority, they use these boys, 
who are Mr. Kipling's heroes, to punish the two victims. Head 
master and clergyman turn a deaf ear to the complaints of an 
indignant mother. All this Mr. Kipling represents as a most 
desirable state of aifairs. In this we have the key to the ugliest, 
most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperial- 
ism ; the idea of a tacit conspiracy hetween the law and illegal 
violence. Just as the Tsardom wrecked itself at last by a fur- 
tive encouragement of the ruffians of the Black Hundreds, who 
massacred Jews and other people supposed to be inimical to 
the Tsar, so the good name of the British Imperial Government 
has been tainted — and is still tainted — by an illegal raid made 
by Doctor Jameson into the Transvaal before the Boer War, 
by the adventures which we shall presently describe, of Sir 
Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead), 
in Ireland and by the tacit connivance of the British govern- 
ment in Ireland with the "reprisals" undertaken by the loyalists 
against the perpetrators of Sinn Fein outrages. By such trea- 
sons against their subjects, empires destroy themselves. The 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 959 

true strength of rulers aud empires lies not in armies and navies, 
but in the belief of men that thej are inflexibly open and truth- 
ful and legal. So soon as a government departs from that 
standard, it ceases to be anything more than "the gang in pos- 
session," and its days are numbered. 



We have already pointed out that there must be a natural 
political map of the world which gives the best possible geo- 
graphical divisions for human administrations. Any other po- 
litical division of the world than this natural political map will 
necessarily be a misfit, and must produce stresses of hostility 
and insurrection tending to shift boundaries in the direction 
indicated by the natural political map. These would seem to 
be self-evident propositions were it not that the diplomatists at 
Vienna evidently neither believed nor understood anything of 
the sort, and thought themselves as free to carve up the world 
as one is free to carve up such a boneless structure as a cheese. 
Nor were these propositions evident to Mr. Gladstone. Most 
of the upheavals and conflicts that began in Europe as the world 
recovered from the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars were 
quite obviously attempts of the ordinary common men to get rid 
of governments that were such misfits as to be in many cases 
intolerable. Generally the existing governments were misfits 
throughout Europe because they were not socially representa- 
tive, and so they were hampering production and wasting human 
possibilities ; but when there were added to these universal an- 
noyances diiferences of religion and racial culture between rul- 
ers and ruled (as in most of Ireland), dift'erences in race and 
language (as in Austrian North Italy and throughout most of 
the Austrian Empire), or differences in all these respects (as 
in Poland and the Turkish Empire in Europe), the exaspera- 
tion drove towards bloodshed. Europe was a system of gov- 
erning machines abominably adjusted. From the stresses of 
this maladjustment the various "nationalist" movements that 
played so large a part in the history of the nineteenth century 
drew their driving force. 

What is a nation ? What is nationality ? If our story of 
the world has demonstrated anything, it has demonstrated the 
mingling of races and peoples, the instability of human divi- 



960 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

sionB, the swirling variety of human groups and human ideas 
of association. A nation, it has heen said, is an accumulation 
of human beings who think they are one people; but we are 
told that Ireland is a nation, and Protestant Ulster certainly 
does not share that idea ; and Italy did not think it was one 
people until long after its unity was accomplished. When the 
writer was in Italy in 1916, people were saying: "This war 
will make us one nation." Again, are the English a nation oi- 
have they merged into a "British nationality" ? Scotchmen do 
not seem to believe very much in this British nationality. It 
cannot be a community of race or language that constitutes a 
nation, because the Gaels and the Lowlanders make up the 
Scotch "nation" ; it cannot be a common religion, for Eng- 
land has scores; nor a common literature, or why is 
Britain separated from the United States, and the Argentine 
Republic from Spain ? We may suggest that a nation is in 
effect any assembly, mixture, or confusion of people which is 
either afflicted by or wishes to be afflicted by a foreign office 
of its own, in order that it should behave collectively as if it 
alone constituted humanity. We have already traced the de- 
velopment of the Machiavellian monarchies into the rule of 
their foreign offices, playing the part of "Powers." The 
"nationality" which dominated the political thought of the 
nineteenth century is really no more than the romantic and 
emotional exaggeration of the stresses produced by the dis- 
cord of the natural political map with unsuitable political 
arrangements. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly through- 
out its latter half, there has been a great working up of this 
nationalism in the world. All men are by nature partisans and 
patriots, but the natural tribalism of men in the nineteenth cen- 
tury was unnaturally exaggerated, it was fretted and over- 
stimulated and inflamed and forced into the nationalist mould. 
Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by newspapers, 
preached and mocked and sung into men. Men were brought 
to feel that they were as improper without a nationality as with- 
out their clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental peoples who 
had never heard of nationality before, took to it as they took 
to the cigarettes and bowler hats of the west. India, a galaxy 
of contrasted races, religions, and cultures, Dravidian, Mongo- 
lian, and Aryan, became a "nation." There were perplexing 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



961 




962 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

cases, of course, as when a young Whitecbapel Jew had to decide 
whether he belonged to the British or the Jewish nation. Cari- 
cature and political cartoons played a large part in this eleva- 
tion of the cult of these newer and bigger tribal gods — for such 
indeed the modern ''nations" are— to their ascendancy over 
the imagination of the nineteenth century. If one turns over 
the pages of Punch, that queer contemporary record of the 
British soul, which has lasted now since 1841, one finds the 
figures of Britannia, Hibernia, Frp.nce, and Germania embrac- 
ing, disputing, reproving, rejoicing, grieving. It greatly helped 
the diplomatists to carry on their game of Great Powers to 
convey politics in this form to the doubting general intelligence. 
To the common man, resentful that his son should be sent 
abroad to be shot, it was made clear that instead of this being 
merely the result of the obstinacy and greed of two foreign 
offices, it was really a necessary part of a righteous inevitable 
gigantic struggle between two of these dim vast divinities. 
France had been wronged by Gcnnania, or Italia was showing 
a proper spirit to Austria. The boy's death ceased to appear 
an outrage on common sense ; it assumed a sort of mythological 
digiiity. And insurrection could clothe itself in the same ro- 
mantic habiliments as diplomacy. Ireland became a' Cinderella 
goddess, Cathleen ni Houlihan, full of heartrending and unfor- 
givable wrongs ; young India transcended its realities in the 
worship of Bande Mataram. 

The essential idea of nineteenth-century nationalism was 
the ''legitimate claim" of every nation to completis sovereignty, 
the claim of every nation to manage all its afi^airs within its 
own territory, regardless of any other nation. The flaw in this 
idea is that the affairs and interests of every modern community 
extend to the uttermost parts of the earth. The assassination of 
Sarajevo in 1914, for example, which caused the great war, 
produced the utmost distress among the Indian tribes of Lab- 
rador because that war interrupted the marketing of the furs 
upon which they relied for such necessities as ammunition, 
without which they could not get sufficient food. A world of 
independent sovereign nations means, -therefore, a world of per- 
petual injuries, a world of states constantly preparing for or wag- 
ing war. But concurrently and discordantly with the preaching 
of this nationalism there was, among the stronger nationalities, 
a vigorous propagation of another set of ideas, the ideas of im- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 963 

perialism, in which a powerful and advanced nation was con- 
ceded the right to dominate a group of other less advanced 
nations or less politically developed nations or peoples whose 
nationality was still undeveloped, who were expected by the 
dominating nation to be grateful for its protection and domi- 
nance. This use of the word empire was evidently a different 
one from its former universal significance. The new empires 
did not even pretend to be a continuation of the world empire 
of Rome. 

These two ideas of nationality and, as the crown of 
national success, ''empire," ruled European political thought, 
ruled indeed the political thought of the world, throughout the 
latter half of the nineteenth century, and ruled it to the prac- 
tical exclusion of any wider conception of a common human 
welfare. They were plausible and dangerously unsound work- 
ing ideas. They represented nothing fundamental and inal- 
terable in human nature, and they failed to meet the new needs 
of world controls and world security that the mechanical revo- 
lution was every day making more imperative. They were 
accepted because people in general had neither the sweeping 
views that a study of world history can give, nor had they 
any longer the comprehensive charity of a world religion. Their 
danger to all the routines of ordinary life was not realized until 
it was too late. 



§ 8 

After the middle of the nineteenth century, this world of 
new powers and old ideas, this fermenting new wine in the 
old bottles of diplomacy, broke out through the flimsy restraints 
of the Treaty of Vienna into a series of wars. By an ironical 
accident the new system of disturbances was preceded by a 
peace festival in London, the Great Exhibition of 1851. 

The moving spirit in this exhibition Avas Prince Albert of 
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the nephew of Leopold I, the German king 
who had been placed upon the Belgian throne in 1831, and 
who was also the maternal uncle of the young Queen Victoria 
of England. She had become queen in 1837 at the age of 
eighteen. The two young cousins — they were of the same age — 
had married in 1840 under their uncle's auspices, and Prince 
Albert was known to the British as the ''Prince Consort." 



964 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

He was a young man of sound intelligence and exceptional 
education, and he seems to have been greatly shocked by the 
mental stagnation into which England had sunken. Oxford 
and Cambridge, those once starry centres, were still recovering 
but slowly from the intellectual ebb of the later eighteenth cen- 
tury. At neither university did the annual matriculations 
number more than four hundred. The examinations were for 
the most part mere viva voce ceremonies. Except for two col- 
leges in London (the University of London) and one in Dur- 
ham, this was all the education on a university footing that 
England had to offer. It was very largely the initiative of this 
scandalized young German who had married the British queen 
which produced the university commission of 1850, and it 
was with a view to waking up England further that he promoted 
the first International Exhibition which was to afford some 
opportunity for a comparison of the artistic and industrial 
products of the various European nations. 

The project was bitterly opposed. In the House of Com- 
mons it was prophesied that England would be overrun by 
foreign rogues and revolutionaries who would corrupt the 
morals of the people and destroy all faith and loyalty in the 
country. 

The exhibition was held in Hyde Park in a great building 
of glass and iron — which afterwards was re-erected as the 
Crystal Palace. Financially it was a gTeat success. It made 
many English people realize for the first time that theirs 
was not the only industrial country in the world, and that 
commercial prosperity was not a divinely appointed British 
monopoly. There was the clearest evidence of a Europe recover- 
ing steadily from the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, and 
rapidly overtaking the British lead in trade and manufacture. 
It was followed directly by the organization of a Science and 
Art Department (1853), to recover, if possible, the educational 
leeway that Britain had lost. 

The exhibition released a considerable amount of interna- 
tional talk and sentiment. It had already found expression in 
the work of such young poets as Tennyson, who had glanced 
down the vista of the future. 

"Till the war-drums throb'd no longer, and the battle-flags 

were furl'd. 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 965 

There was much shallow optimism on the part of comfortable 
people just then. Peace seemed to be more secure than it had 
been for a long time. The social gales of 1848 had blown, 
and, it seemed, blown themselves out. Nowhere had the revo- 
lution succeeded. In France it had been betrayed a second 
time by a Bonaparte, a nephew of the first Napoleon, but a 
much more supple man. He had posed as a revolutionary 
while availing himself of the glamour of his name; he had 
twice attempted raids on France during the Orleans monarchy. 
He had written a manual of artillery to link himself to his 
uncle's prestige, and he had also published an account of what 
he alleged to be Napoleonic views, Des Idees Napoleoniennes 
in which he jumbled up socialism, socialistic reform, and 
pacificism with the Napoleonic legend. The republic of 1848 
was soon in difficulties with crude labour experiments, and in 
October he was able to re-enter the country and stand for elec- 
tion as President. He took an oath as President to be faithful 
to the democratic republic, and to regard as enemies all who 
attempted to change the form of government. In two years' 
time (December, 1852) he was Emperor of the French. 

At first he was regarded with considerable suspicion by 
Queen Victoria, or rather by Baron Stockmar, the friend and 
servant of King Leopold of Belgium, and the keeper of the 
international conscience of the British queen and her consort. 
All this group of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha people had a reasonable 
and generous enthusiasm for the unity and well-being of 
Germany — upon liberal lines — and they were disposed to 
be alarmed at this Bonapartist revival. Lord Palmerston, 
the British foreign minister, was, on the other hand, 
friendly with the usurper from the outset; he offended 
the queen by sending amiable dispatches to the French 
President without submitting them for her examination 
and so giving her sufficient time to consult Stockmar upon 
them, and he was obliged to resign. But subsequently the 
British Court veered round to a more cordial attitude to the 
new adventurer. The opening years of his reign promised a 
liberal monarchy rather than a Napoleonic career; a govern- 
ment of "cheap bread, great public works, and holidays," ^ and 
he expressed himself warmly in favour of the idea of national- 
ism, which was naturally a very acceptable idea to any liberal 
* Albert Thomas in the Encyolofcedia Britannica. 



966 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



German intelligence. There had been a brief all-Gennan par- 
liament at Frankfort in 1848, which was overthrown in 1849 
by the Prussian monarchy. 

Before 1848 all the great European courts of the Vienna 
settlement had been kept in a kind of alliance by the fear of a 



IMlp of /EUROFIE. 1848-1871 




IsT. GermiLn. Confederation , 1866 

German Empire, 1B71 ' ' "i 

fVartc^ tetTiijary zicquircd. I ""^ 

(;3avcy<S'Nu:e.l860} L J 

temtDiy lost ► ,■ i 

(AUace Lorraina ,1871 I. ..../,. A 
AujtrLa. temtoiylcst 



(Lombardy 1859 Vcneba. 1360 i 
[For Italif se^ aiso separ3.U map] 



second and more universal democratic revolution. After the 
revolutionary failures of 1848 this fear was lifted, and they 
were free to resume the scheming and counter-scheming of the 
days before 1789 — with the vastly more powerful armies and 
fleets the first Napoleonic phase had given them. The game of 
Great Powers was resumed with zest, after an interval of sixty 
years, and it continued until it produced the catastrophe of 
1914. 

The Tsar of Kussia, Nicholas I, was the first to move to- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



967 



wards war. He resumed the traditional thrust of Peter the 
Great towards Constantinople. ISTicholas invented the phrase 
of the ''sick man of Europe" for the Sultau, and, finding an 
excuse in the misgovernment of the Christian population of 
the Turkish empire, he occupied the Danuhian principalities 
in 1853. European diplomatists found themselves with a 



^^ kingdom: of yxi^clx: isei . 



/ SWITZERLAND / ^ 777 




Tunvs 
A F R I C A 



question of quite the eighteenth-century pattern. The designs 
of Russia were understood to clash with the designs of France 
in Syria, and to threaten the Mediterranean route to India 
of Great Britain, and the outcome was an alliance of France 
and England to bolster up Turkey and a war, the Crimean 
War, which ended in the repulse of Russia. One might have 
thought that the restraint of Russia was rather the husiness of 
Austria and Gennany, but the passion of tlie foreign offices of 



968 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

France and England for burning their fingers in Eussian affairs 
has always been very difficult to control. 

The next phase of interest in this revival of the Great Power 
drama was the exploitation by the Emperor Napoleon III and 
tbe king of the small kingdom of Sardinia in North Italy, of 
the inconveniences and miseries of the divided state of Italy, 
and particularly of the Austrian rule in the north. The King 
of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, made an old-time bargain for 
Napoleon's help in return for the provinces of Nice and Savoy. 
The war between France and Sardinia on the one hand, and 
Austria on the other, broke out in 1859, and was over in a few 
weeks. The Austrians were badly beaten at Magenta and Sol- 
ferino. Then, being threatened by Prussia on the Ehine, Na- 
poleon made peace, leaving Sardinia the richer for Lombardy. 

The next move in the game of Victor Emmanuel, and of his 
chief minister Cavour, was an insurrectionary movement in 
Sicily led by the great Italian patriot Garibaldi. Sicily and 
Naples were liberated, and all Italy, except only Rome (which 
remained loyal to the Pope) and Venetia, which was held by 
the Austrians, fell to the king cff Sardinia. A general Italian 
parliament met at Turin in 1861, and Victor Emmanuel be- 
came the first king of Italy. 

But now the interest in this game of European diplomacy 
shifted to Germany. Already the common sense of the natural 
political map had asserted itself. In 1848 all Germany, in- 
cluding, of course, German Austria, was for a time united under 
the Frankfort parliament. But that sort of union was partic- 
ularly offensive to all the German- courts and foreign offices; 
they did not want a Germany united by the will of its people, 
they wanted Germany united by legal and diplomatic action — 
as Italy was being united. In 1848 the German parliament 
had insisted that the largely German provinces of Schleswig- 
Holstein, wdiieh had been in the German Bund, must belong 
to Germany. It had ordered the Prussian army to occupy 
them, and the king of Prussia had refused to take his orders 
from the German parliament, and so had precipitated the down- 
fall of that body. Now the King of Denmark, Christian IX, 
for no conceivable motive except the natural folly of kings, 
embarked upon a campaign of annoyance against the Germans 
in these two duchies. Prussian affairs were then very much 
in the hands of a minister of the seventeenth-century typo. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 969 

von Bismarck (count in 1865, prince in 1871), and he saw 
brilliant opportunities in this trouble. He became the cham- 
pion of the German nationality in these duchies — it must be 
remembered that the King of Prussia had refused to under- 
take this role for democratic Germany in 1848 — and he per- 
suaded Austria to side with Prussia in a military interven- 
tion. Denmark had no chance against these Great Powers ; 
she was easily beaten and obliged to relinquish the duchies. 
Then Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria for the posses- 
sion of these two small states. So he brought about a needless 
and fratricidal war of Germans for the greater glory of Prus- 
sia and the ascendancy of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Ger- 
many. German writers of a romantic turn of mind represent 
Bismarck as a great statesman planning the unity of Germany ; 
but indeed he was doing nothing of the kind. The unity of 
Germany was a reality in 1848. It was and is in the nature 
of things. The Prussian monarchy was simply delaying the 
inevitable in order to seem to achieve it in Prussian fashion. 
That is why, when at last Germany was unified, instead of 
bearing the likeness of a modern civilized people, it presented 
itself to the world with the face of this archaic Bismarck, with a 
fierce moustache, huge jack boots, a spiked helmet, and a sword. 

In this war between Prussia and Austria, Prussia had for 
an ally Italy ; most of the smaller German states, who dreaded 
the schemes of Prussia, fought on the side of Austria. The 
reader will naturally want to know why Napoleon III did 
not grasp this admirable occasion for statecraft and come into 
the war to his own advantage. All the rules of the Great Power 
game required that he should. But jSTapoleon, unhappily for 
himself, had got his fingers in a trap on the other side of the 
Atlantic, and was in no position to intervene. 

In order to understand the entanglement of this shifty gen- 
tleman, it is necessary to explain that the discord in interests 
between the northeni and southern states of the American 
union, due to the economic differences based on slavery, had at 
last led to open civil war. The federal system established in 
1789 had to fight the secessionist efforts of the confederated 
slave-holding states. We have traced the causes of that great 
struggle in Chapter XXXVI, § 6; its course we cannot relate 
here, nor tell how President Lincoln (born 1809, died 1865, 
president from 1861) rose to greatness, how the republic was 



970 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



cleansed from the stain of slavery, and how the federal govern- 
ment of the union was preserved. The story of President Lin- 
coln is in itself a great epic of union and order threatened and 
saved, and it is with reluctance that it is treated so briefly here. 
But in this Outline we must cling closely to our main story. 
For four long years (1861-65) this American civil war 
swung to and fro, through the rich woods and over the hills of 
Virginia between Washington and Richmond, until at last the 
secessionist left was thrust back and broken, and Sherman, the 

unionist general, swept 
across Georgia to the sea in 
the rear of the main confed- 
erate (secessionist) armies. 
All the elements of reaction 
in Europe rejoiced during 
the four years of republican 
dissension; the British aris- 
tocracy openly sided with 
the confederate states, and 
the British Government per- 
mitted several privateers, 
and particularly the Ala- 
bama, to be launched in 
3Ls-marck, England to attack the fed- 

eral shipping. Napoleon 
III was even more rash in his assumption that after all the 
new world had fallen before the old. The sure shield of the 
Monroe Doctrine, it seemed to him, was thrust aside for good, 
the Great Powers might meddle again in America, and the 
blessings of an adventurous monarchy be restored there. A 
pretext for interference was found in certain liberties taken 
with the property of foreigners by the Mexican president. A 
joint expedition of French, British, and Spanish occupied 
Vera Cruz, but Napoleon's projects were too bold for his allies, 
and they withdrew when it became clear that he contemplated 
nothing less than the establishment of a Mexican empire. This 
he did, after much stiff fighting, making the Archduke Maxi- 
milian of Austria Emperor of Mexico in 1864. The French 
forces, however, remained in effectual possession of the coun- 
try, and a crowd of French speculators poured into Mexico to 
exploit its mines and resources. 




THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 971 

But in April, 18G5, the civil war in the United States was 
brought to an end with the surrender of the great southern 
commander, General Lee, at Appomattox Court House, and 
the little group of eager Europeans in possession of Mexico 
found themselves faced bj the victorious federal government 
in a thoroughly grim mood, with a large, dangerous-looking 
army in hand. The French imperialists were bluntly given 
the alternative of war with the United States or clearing out 
of America. In effect this was an instruction to go. This 
was the entanglement which prevented Napoleon III from 
interference between Prussia and Austria in 186G, and this 
was the reason why Bismarck precipitated his struggle with 
Austria. 

While Prussia was fighting Austria, Napoleon III was try- 
ing to escape with dignity from the briars of Mexico. He in- 
vented a shabby quarrel upon financial grounds with Maxi- 
milian and withdrew the French troops. Then, by all the rules 
of kingship, Maximilian should have abdicated. But instead 
he made a fight for his empire; he was defeated by his re- 
calcitrant subjects, caught, and shot as a public nuisance in 
1867. So the peace of President Monroe was restored to the 
new world. There remained only one monarchy in America, 
the empire of Brazil, where a branch of the Portuguese royal 
family continued to reign until 1889. In that year the em- 
peror was quietly packed off to Paris, and Brazil came into line 
with the rest of the continent. 

But while Napoleon was busy with his American adventure, 
Prussia and Italy were snatching victory over the Austrians 
(1866). Italy was badly beaten at Custozza and in the naval 
battle of Lissa, but the Austrian army was so crushed by the 
Prussian at the battle of Sadowa that Austria made an abject 
surrender. Italy gained the province of Venetia, so making 
one more step towards unity — only Rome and Trieste and a 
few small towns on the north and north-western frontiers re- 
mained — and Prussia became the head of a North German 
Confederation, from which Bavaria, Wiirttemberg, Baden, 
Hesse, and Austria were excluded. 

Four years later came the next step towards the natural 
political map of Europe, when Napoleon III plunged into 
war against Prussia. A kind of self-destroying foolishness 
urc:ed him to do this. He came near to this war in 1867 so 



972 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

soon as he was free from Mexico, by demanding Luxembourg 
for France; he embarked upon it in 1870, when a cousin of 
the king of Prussia became a candidate for the vacant throne 
of Spain, l^apoleon had some theory in his mind that Austria, 
Bavaria, Wiirttemberg, and the other states outside the North 
German Confederation would side with him against Prussia. 
He probably thought this would happen because he wanted 
it to happen. But since 1848 the Germans, so far as foreign 
meddling was concerned, had been in spirit a united people; 
Bismarck was merely imposing the Hohenzollern monarchy, 
with pomp, ceremony, and bloodshed, upon accomplished facts. 
All Germany sided with Prussia. 

Early in Augaist, 1870, the united German forces invaded 
France. After the battles of Worth and Gravelotte, one 
French army under Bazaine was forced into Metz and sur- 
rounded there, and, on September 1st, a second, with which 
was Napoleon, was defeated and obliged to capitulate at Sedan. 
Paris found herself bare to the invader. For a second time 
the promises of Napoleonism had failed France disastrously. 
On September 4th, France declared herself a republic again, 
and thus regenerated, prepared to fight for existence against 
triumphant Prussianism. For though it was a united Ger- 
many that had overcome French imperialism, it had Prussia 
in the saddle. The army in Metz capitulated in October ; Paris, 
after a siege and bombardment, surrendered in January, 1871. 

With pomp and ceremony, in the Hall of Mirrors at Ver- 
sailles, amidst a great array of military uniforms, the King 
of Prussia was declared German Emperor, and Bismarck and 
the sword of the Hohenzollerns claimed the credit for that 
German unity which a common language and literature had 
long since assured. 

The peace of Frankfort was a Hohenzollern peace. Bis- 
marck had availed himself of the national feeling of Germany 
to secure the aid of the South German states, but he had no 
grasp of the essential forces that had given victory to him and 
to his royal master. The power that had driven Prussia to 
victory was the power of the natural political map of Europe 
insisting upon the unity of the German-speaking peoples. In 
the east, Germany was already sinning against that natural 
map by her administration of Posen and other Polish districts 
Now greedy for territory, and particularly for iron mines, she 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 973 

annexed a considerable area of French-speaking Lorraine, in- 
cluding Metz, and Alsace, which, in spite of its German 
speech, was largely French in sympathy. Inevitably there was 
a clash between German rulers and French subjects in these 
annexed provinces ; inevitably the wrongs and bitterness of 
the subjugated France of Lorraine echoed in Paris and kept 
alive the passionate resentment of the French. . . . 

The natural map had already secured political recognition 
in the Austrian Empire after Sadowa (1866). Hungary, 
which had been subordinated to Austria, was erected into a 
kingdom on an equal footing with Austria, and the Empire of 
Austria had become the "dual monarchy" of Austria-Hungary. 
But in the south-east of this empire, and over the Turkish 
empire, the boundaries and subjugations of the conquest period 
still remained. 

A fresh upthrust of the natural map began in 1875, when 
the Christian races in the Balkans, and particularly the Bul- 
garians, became restless and insurgent. The Turks adopted 
violent repressive measures, and embarked upon massacres of 
Bulgarians on an enormous scale. Thereupon Russia inter- 
vened (1877), and after a year of costly warfare obliged the 
Turks to sign the treaty of San Stefano, which was, on the 
whole, a sensible treaty, breaking up the artificial Turkish 
Empire, and to a large extent establishing the natural map. 
But it had become the tradition of British policy to thwart 
"the designs of Russia" — ^heaven knows why ! — whenever Rus- 
sia appeared to have a design, and the British foreign office, 
under the premiership of Lord Beaconsfield, intervened with 
a threat of war if a considerable restoration of the Turks' 
facilities for exaction, persecution, and massacre was not made. 
For a time war seemed very probable. The British music-halls 
those lamps to British foreign policy, were lit with patriotic 
fire, and the London errand-boy on his rounds was inspired to 
chant, with the simple dignity of a great people conscious of 
its high destinies, a song declaring that: 

"We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo,* if we do. 
We got the ships, we got the men, we got the munn-aye too "... 

and so on to a climax: 

"The Russ'ns shall not 'ave Con-stan-te-no pie." 

' Hence "Jingo" for any rabid patriot. 



974 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



In consequence of this British opposition, a conference was 
assembled in 1878 at Berlin to revise the treaty of San Stefano, 
chiefly in the interests of the Turkish and Austrian mon- 
archies, the British acquired the island of Cyprus, to which 
they had no sort of right whatever, and which has never been 
of the slightest use to them, and Lord Beaconsfield returned 
triumphantly from the Berlin Conference, to the extreme ex- 



■to {lliisiTate. the 

TREAT^^BERLIM 



t\r" 



RUSSIA 




PraposeA 'Bj^Bulgeiri^ 
B-anikr q£ Treafy of 5an 
Stefano ibi«.««'"" 



asperation of Mr. Gladstone, with what the British were given 
to understand at the time was "Peace with Honour." 

This treaty of Berlin was the second main factor, the peace 
of Frankfort being the first, in bringing about the great war 
of 1914-18. 

These thirty years after 1848 are years of very great in- 
terest to the student of international political methods. Re- 
leased from their terror of a world-wide insurrection of the 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 975 

common people, the governments of Europe were doing their 
best to resume the game of Great Powers that had been so 
rudely interrupted by the American and French revolutions. 
But it looked much more like the old game than it was in 
reality. The mechanical revolution was making war a far 
more complete disturbance of the general life than it had ever 
been before, and the proceedings of the diplomatists were ruled, 
in spite of their efforts to disregard the fact, by imperatives 
that Charles V and Louis XIV had never known. Irritation 
with misgovernment was capable of far better organization and 
far more effective expression than it had ever been before. 
Statesmen dressed this up as the work of the spirit of Na- 
tionalism, but there were times and occasions when that cos- 
tume wore very thin. The grand monarchs of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries had seemed to be free to do this or 
that, to make war or to keep the peace, to conquer this province 
or cede that as they willed ; but such a ruler as Napoleon III 
went from one proceeding to another with something of the 
effect of a man who feels his way among things unseen. 

None of these European governments in the nineteenth cen- 
tury was in fact a free agent. We look to-day at the maps of 
Europe since 1814, we compare them with the natural map, 
and we see that the game the Great Powers played was indeed 
a game of foregone conclusions. Whatever arrangements they 
made that were in accordance with the natural political map 
of the world, and the trend towards educational democracy, 
held, and whatever arrangements they made contrary to these 
things, collapsed. We are forced, therefore, to the conclusion 
that all the diplomatic fussing, posturing, and scheming, all 
the intrigue and bloodshed of these years, all the monstrous 
turmoil and waste of kings and armies, all the wonderful atti- 
tudes, deeds, and schemes of the Cavours, Bismarcks, Disraelis, 
Bonapartes, and the like "gi'eat men," might very well have 
been avoided altogether had Europe but had the sense to in- 
struct a small body of ordinarily honest ethnologists, geog- 
raphers, and sociologists to draw out its proper boundaries 
and prescribe suitable forms of government in a reasonable 
manner. The romantic phase in history had come to an end. 
A new age was beginning with new and greater imperatives, 
and these nineteenth-century statesmen were but pretending 
to control events. 



976 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 977 

§ 9 

We have suggested that in the political history of Europe 
between 1848 and 1878, the mechanical revolution was not 
yet producing any very revolutionary changes. The post-revo- 
lutionary Great Powers were still going on within boundaries 
of practically the same size and with much the same formalities 
as they had done in pre-revolutionary times. But where the 
increased speed and certainty of transport and telegraphic com- 
munications were already producing very considerable changes 
of condition and method, was in the overseas enterprises of 
Britain and the other European powers, and in the reaction 
of Asia and Africa to Europe. 

The end of the eighteenth century was a period of disrupt- 
ing empires and disillusioned expansionists. The long and 
tedious journey between Britain and Spain and their colonies 
in America prevented any really free coming and going be- 
tween the home land and the daughter lands, and so the colonies 
separated into new and distinct communities, with distinctive 
ideas and interests and even modes of speech. As they grew 
they strained more and more at the feeble and uncertain link 
of shipping that joined them. Weak trading-posts in the 
wilderness, like those of France in Canada, or trading estab- 
lishments in great alien communities, like those of Britain in 
India, might well cling for bare existence to the nation which 
gave them support and a reason for their existence. That 
much and no more seemed to many thinkers in the early part 
of the nineteenth century to be the limit set to overseas rule. 
Tn 1820 the sketchy great European "empires" outside of 
Europe that had figured so bravely in the maps of the middle 
eighteenth century, had shrunken to very small dimensions. 
Only the Russian sprawded as large as ever across Asia. It 
sprawled much larger in the imaginations of many Europeans 
than in reality, because of their habit of studying the geography 
of the world upon Mercat-or's projection, which enormously 
exaggerated the size of Siberia. 

The British Empire in 1815 consisted of the thinly popu- 
lated coastal river and lake regions of Canada, and a great 
hinterland of wilderness in which the only settlements as yet 
were the fur-trading stations of the Hudson Bay Company, 
about a third of the Indian peninsula, under the rule of the 



978 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 979 

East India Company, the coast districts of the Cape of Good 
Hope inhabited by blacks and rebellious-spirited Dutch settlers ; 
a few trading stations on the coast of West Africa, the rock 
of Gibraltar, the island of Malta, Jamaica, a few minor 
slave-labour possessions in the West Indies, British Guiana in 
South America, and, on the other side of the world, two dumps 
for convicts at Botany Bay in Australia and in Tasmania. 
Spain retained Cuba and a few settlements in the Philippine 
Islands. Portugal had in Africa some vestiges of her ancient 
claims. Holland had various islands and possessions in the 
East Indies and Dutch Guiana, and Denmark an island or so 
in the West Indies. France had one or two West Indian 
Islands and French Guiana. This seemed to be as much as 
the European powers needed, or were likely to acquire of 
the rest of the world. Only the East India Company showed 
any spirit of expansion. 

In India, as we have already told, a peculiar empire was 
being built up, not by the British peoples, nor by the British 
Government, but by this company of private adventurers with 
their monopoly and royal charter. The company had been 
forced to become a military and political power during the 
years of Indian division and insecurity that followed the break- 
up of India after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. It had 
learnt to trade in states and peoples during the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Clive founded, Warren Hastings organized, this strange 
new sort of empire; French rivalry was defeated, as we have 
already toM ; and by 1798, Lord Mornington, afterwards the 
Marquis Wellesley, the elder brother of that General Wellesley 
who became the Duke of Wellington, became Governor-General 
of India, and set the policy of the company definitely upon the 
line of replacing the fading empire of the Great Mogul by its 
own rule. Napoleon's expedition to Egypt was a direct attack 
upon the empire of this British company. While Europe was 
busy with the Napoleonic wars, the East India Company, under 
a succession of governors-general, was playing much the same 
role in India that had been played before by Turkoman and 
such-like invaders from the north, but playing it with a greater 
efficiency and far less violence and cruelty. And after the peace 
of Vienna it went on, levying its revenues, making wars, sending 
ambassadors to Asiatic powers, a quasi-independent state, a state, 
however, with a marked disposition to send wealth westward. 



980 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

In a previous chapter we have sketched the break-up of the 
empire of the Great Mogul and the appearance of the Mahratta 
states, the Kajput principalities, the Moslem kingdoms of 
Oudh and Bengal, and the Sikhs. We cannot tell here in any 
detail how the British company made its way to supremacy 
sometimes as the ally of this power, sometimes as that, and 
finally as the conqueror of all. Its power spread to Assam, 
Sind, Oudh. The map of India began to take on the outlines 
familiar to the English schoolboy of to-day, a patchwork of 
native states embraced and held together by the great provinces 
under direct British rule. . . . 

Now as this strange unprecedented empire of the company 
grew in the period between 1800 and 1858, the mechanical revo- 
lution was quietly abolishing the great distance that had once 
separated India and Britain. In the old days the rule of the 
company had interfered little in the domestic life of the Indian 
states ; it had given India foreign overlords, but India was 
used to foreign overlords, and had hitherto assimilated them ; 
these Englishmen came into the country young, lived there 
most of their lives, and became a part of its system. But now 
the mechanical revolution began to alter this state of affairs. 
It became easier for the British officials to go home and to 
have holidays in Europe, easier for them to bring out wives and 
families; they ceased to be Indianized; they remained more 
conspicuously foreign and western — and there were more of 
them. And they began to interfere more vigorously with Indian 
customs. Magical and terrible things like the telegraph and 
the railway arrived. Christian missions became offensively 
busy. If they did not make very many converts, at least they 
made sceptics among the adherents of the older faiths. The 
young men in the towns began to be '^Europeanized" to the 
great dismay of their elders. 

India had endured many changes of rulers before, but never 
the sort of changes in her ways that these things portended. 
The Moslem teachers and the Brahmins were alike alarmed, and 
the British were blamed for the progress of mankind. Conflicts 
of economic interests grew more acute with the increasing near- 
ness of Europe; Indian industries, and particularly the ancient 
cotton industry, suffered from legislation that favoured the 
British manufacturer. A piece of incredible folly on the part 
of the company precipitated an outbreak. To the Brahmin a 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 981 

cow is sacred ; to the Moslem the pig is unclean. A new rifle, 
needing greased cartridges — which the men had to bite — was 
served out to the company's Indian soldiers ; the troops dis- 
covered that their cartridges were greased with the fat of cows 
and swiue. This discovery precipitated a revolt of the com- 
pany's Indian army, the Indian Mutiny (1857). First the 
troops mutinied at Meerut. Then Delhi rose to restore the 
empire of the Great Mogul. . . . 

The British public suddenly discovered India. They became 
aware of that little garrison of British people, far away in 
that strange land of fiery dust and weary sunshine, fighting for 
life against dark multitudes of assailants. How they got there 
and what right they had there, the British public did not ask. 
The love of one's kin in danger overrides such questions. 
There were massacres and cruelties. 1857 was a year of pas- 
sionate anxiety in Great Britain. With mere handfuls of 
troops the British leaders, and notably Lawrence and Nichol- 
son, did amazing things. They did not sit down to be besieged 
while the mutineers organized and gathered prestige; that would 
have lost them India for ever. They attacked often against 
overwhelming odds. ''Clubs, not spades, are trumps," said 
Lawrence. The Sikhs, the Gurkhas, the Punjab troops stuck 
to the British. The south remained tranquil. Of the massacres 
of Cawnpore and Lucknow in Oudh, and how a greatly out- 
numbered force of British troops besieged and stormed Delhi, 
other histories must tell. By April, 1859, the last embers of 
the blaze had been stamped out, and the British were masters 
of India again. In no sense had the mutiny been a popular 
insurrection ; it was a mutiny merely of the Bengal Army, due 
largely to the unimaginative rule of the company officials. Its 
story abounds in instances of Indian help and kindness to Brit- 
ish fugitives. But it was a warning. 

The direct result of the mutiny was the annexation of the 
Indian Empire to the British Crown. By the Act entitled 
An Act for the Better Government of India, the Governor- 
General became a Viceroy representing the Sovereign, and the 
place of the company was taken by a Secretary of State for 
India responsible to the British Parliament. In 1877, Lord 
Beaconsfield, to complete this work, caused Queen Victoria to be 
proclaimed Empress of India. 

Upon these extraordinary lines India and Britain ai-e linked 



982 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

at the present time. India is still the empire of the Great 
Mogul, expanded, but the Great Mogul has been replaced by 
the "crowned republic" of Great Britain. India is an autocracy 
without an autocrat. Its rule combines the disadvantage of 
absolute monarchy with the impersonality and irresponsibility 
of democratic officialdom. The Indian with a complaint to 
make has no visible monarch to go to ; his Emperor is a golden 
symbol ; he must circulate pamphlets in England or inspire a 
question in the British House of Commons. The more occupied 
Parliament is with British affairs, the less attention India will 
receive, and the more she will be at the mercy of her small group 
of higher officials. 

This is manifestly impossible as a permanent state of affairs. 
Indian life, whatever its restraints, is moving forward with the 
rest of the world ; India has an increasing service of news- 
papers, an increasing number of educated people affected by 
Western ideas, and an increasing sense of a common grievance 
against her government. There has been little or no corre- 
sponding advance in the education and quality of the British 
official in India during the past seventy years. His tradition 
is a high one ; he is often a man of exceptional quality, but the 
system is unimaginative and inflexible. Moreover, the military 
power that stands behind these officials has developed neither in 
character nor intelligence during the last century. No other 
class has been so stagnant intellectually as the British military 
caste. Confronted with a more educated India, the British 
military man, uneasily aware of his educational defects and 
constantly apprehensive of ridicule, has in the last few years 
displayed a disposition towards spasmodic violence that has had 
some very lamentable results. For a time the great war alto- 
gether diverted what small amount of British public attention 
was previously given to India, and drew away the more intelli- 
gent military men from her service. During those years, and 
the feverish years of unsettlement that followed, things occurred 
in India, the massacre of an unarmed crowd at Amritzar in 
which nearly two thousand people were killed or wounded, 
floggings and humiliating outrages, a sort of official's Terror, 
that produced a profound moral shock when at last the Hunter 
Commission of 1919 brought them before the home public. In 
liberal-minded Englishmen, who have been wont to regard their 
empire as an incipient league of free peoples, this revelation 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY • 983 

of the barbaric quality in its administrators produced a very 
understandable dismay. . . . 

But the time has not yet come for writing the chapter of 
history that India is opening for herself. . . . We cannot dis- 
cuss here in detail the still unsettled problems of the new India 
that struggles into being. Already in the Government of India 
Act of 1919 we may have the opening of a new and happier 
era that may culminate in a free and willing group of Indian 
peoples taking an equal place among the confederated states 
of the world. . . . 

The growth of the British Empire in directions other than 
that of India was by no means so rapid during the earlier half 
of the nineteenth century. A considerable school of political 
thinkers in Britain was disposed to regard overseas possessions 
as a source of weakness to the kingdom. The Australian settle- 
ments developed slowly until in 1842 the discovery of valuable 
copper mines, and in 1851 of gold, gave them a new importance. 
Improvements in transport were also making Australian wool 
an increasingly marketable commodity in Europe. Canada, too, 
was not remarkably progressive until 1849; it was troubled 
by dissensions between its French and British inhabitants, there 
were several serious revolts, and it was only in 1867 that a 
new constitution creating a Federal Dominion of Canada re- 
lieved its internal strains. It was the railway that altered the 
Canadian outlook. It enabled Canada, just as it enabled the 
United States, to expand westward, to market its corn and 
other produce in Europe, and in spite of its swift and extensive 
growth, to remain in language and sympathy and interests one 
community. The railway, the steamship, and the telegraphic 
cable were indeed changing all the conditions of colonial 
development. 

Before 1840, English settlements had already begun in 
New Zealand, and a New Zealand Land Company had been 
formed to exploit the possibilities of the island. In 1840 N"ew 
Zealand also was added to the colonial possessions of the British 
Crown. 

Canada, as we have noted, was the first of the British pos- 
sessions to respond richly to the new economic possibilities the 
new methods of transport were opening. Presently the re- 
publics of South America, and particularly the Argentine 
Pepublic, began to feel, in their cattle trade and coffee growing, 



984 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the increased nearness of the European market. Hitherto the 
chief commodities that had attracted the European powers into 
unsettled and barbaric regions had been gold or other metals, 
spices, ivory, or slaves. But in the latter quarter of the nine- 
teenth century the increase of the European populations was 
obliging their governments to look abroad for staple foods ; and 
the growth of scientific industrialism was creating a demand 
for new raw materials, fats and greases of every kind, rubber, 
and other hitherto disregarded substances. It was plain that 
Great Britain and Holland and Portugal were reaping a great 
and growing commercial advantage from their very consider- 
able control of tropical and sub-tropical products. After 1871 
Germany and presently France and later Italy began to look 
for unannexed raw-material areas, or for Oriental countries 
capable of profitable modernization. 

So began a fresh scramble all over the world, except in the 
American region where the Monroe Doctrine now barred such 
adventures, for politically unprotected lands. Close to Europe 
was the continent of Africa, full of vaguely known possibilities. 
In 1850 it was a continent of black mystery; only Egypt and 
the coast were known. A map must show the greatness of the 
European ignorance at that time. It would need a book as long 
as this Outline to do justice, to the amazing story of the ex- 
plorers and adventurers who first pierced this cloud of dark- 
ness, and to the political agents, administrators, traders, set- 
tlers, and scientific men who followed in their track. Wonder- 
ful races of men like the pigmies, strange beasts like the okapi, 
mar\^ellous fruits and flowers and insects, terrible diseases, 
astounding scenery of forest and mountain, enonnous inland 
seas and gigantic rivers and cascades were revealed ; a whole 
new world. Even remains (at Zimbabwe) of some unrecorded 
and vanished civilization, the southward enterprise of an early 
people, were discovered. Into this new world came the Euro- 
peans, and found the rifle already there in the hands of the 
Arab slave-traders, and negro life in disorder. By 1900, as 
our second map must show, all Africa was mapped, explored, 
estimated, and divided between the European powers, divided 
with much snarling and disputation into portions that left each 
power uneasy or discontented. Little heed was given to the 
welfare of the natives in this scramble. The Arab slaver was 
indeed curbed rather than expelled, but the greed for rubber. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



985 



which was a wild product collected under compulsion by the 
natives in the Belgian Congo, a greed exacerbated by the pitiless 
avarice of the King of the Belgians, and the clash of inexperi- 
enced European administrators with the native population in 
many other annexations, led to horrible atrocities. No Euro- 
pean power has perfectly clean hands in this matter. 







Canary Is.^; 



R'3 



r h A j: 



K a. T a 



- ■■ s 



■^ ^ZJ> >JW OU . /Gaboon ;! 

^ (firi&sh.Duich, Danish. &cy J^ (7'r'^ 



ni 



1-.^^^, 




AFRICAr 

ahcfutihc tniclMe 
ofihe ip^ Ccniun£ 



We cannot tell here in any detail how Great Britain got 
possession of Egypt in 1883, and remained there in spite of 
the fact that Egypt was technically a part of the Turkish 
Empire, nor hoAv nearly this scramble led to war between France 
and Great Britain in 1898, when a certain Colonel Marchand, 
crossing Central Africa from the west coast, tried at Fashoda 
to seize the Upper Nile. In Uganda the French Catholic and 



986 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the British Anglican missionaries disseminated a form of Chris- 
tianity so heavily charged with the spirit of Napoleon, and so 
finely insistent npon the nnances of doctrine, that a few years 
after its first glimpse of Enropean civilization, ^lengo, the capi- 
tal of Uganda, was littered with dead ''Protestants" and "Catho- 




lics" extremely difficnlt to disting-uish from the entirely un- 
spiritnal warriors of the old regime. 

Nor can we tell how the British Government first let the 
Boers, or Dutch settlers, of the Orange Eiver district and the 
Transvaal set up independent republics in the inland parts of 
South Africa, and then repented and annexed the Transvaal 
Republic in 1877; nor how the Transvaal Boers fought for 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 987 

freedom and won it after the Battle of Majnba Hill (1881). 
Majuba Hill was made to rankle in the memory of the English 
people by a persistent press campaign. A war with both re- 
publics broke out in 1890, a three years' war enormously costly 
to the British people, which ended at last in the surrender of 
the two republics. 

Their period of subjugation was a brief one. In 1907, after 
the downfall of the imperialist government which had con- 
quered them, the Liberals took the South African problem in 
hand, and these former republics became free and fairly will- 
ing associates with Cape Colony and Natal in a confederation 
of all the states of South Africa as one self-governing republic 
under the British Crown. 

In a quarter of a century the partition of Africa was com- 
pleted. There remained unannexed three comparatively small 
countries: Liberia, a settlement of liberated negro slaves on 
the west coast; Morocco, under a Moslem Sultan; and Abys- 
sinia, a barbaric country, with an ancient and peculiar form of 
Christianity, which had successfully maintained its independ- 
ence against Italy at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. 



§ 10 

It is difficult to believe that any large number of people really 
accepted this headlong painting of the map of Africa in Euro- 
pean colours as a permanent new settlement of the world's 
affairs, but it is the duty of the historian to record that it was 
so accepted. There was but a shallow historical background 
to the European mind in the nineteenth century, hardly any 
sense of what constitutes an enduring political system, and no 
habit of penetrating criticism. The quite temporary advantages 
that the onset of the mechanical revolution in the west had given 
the European Great Powers over the rest of the old world were 
regarded by people, blankly ignorant of the great Mongol con- 
quests of the thirteenth and following centuries, as evidences 
of a permanent and assured leadership. They had no sense of 
the transferability of science and its fruits. They did not 
realize that Chinamen and Indians could carry on the work of 
research as ably as Frenchmen or Englishmen. They believed 
that there was some innate intellectual drive in the west, and 



988 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

some innate indolence and conservatism in the east, that assured 
the Europeans a world predominance for ever. 

The consequence of this infatuation was that the various 
European foreign offices set themselves not merely to scramble 
with the British for the savage and undeveloped regions of 
the world's surface, but also to carve up the populous and 
civilized countries of Asia as though these peoples also were 
no more than raw material for European exploitation. The 
inwardly precarious but outwardly splendid imperialism of 
the British ruling class in India, and the extensive and profit- 
able possessions of the Dutch in the East Indies, filled the 
ruling and mercantile classes of the rival Great Powers with 
dreams of similar glories in Persia, in the disintegrating Otto- 
man Empire, and in Further India, China, and Japan. In 
the closing years of the nineteenth century it was assumed, as 
the reader may verify by an examination of the current litera- 
ture of the period, to be a natural and inevitable thing that all 
the world should fall under European dominion. With a 
reluctant benevolent effort the European mind prepared itself 
to take up what Mr. Rudyard Kipling called ''the White Man's 
Burthen" — that is to say, the lordship of the earth. The 
Powers set themselves to this enterprise in a mood of jostling 
rivalry, with half-educated or illiterate populations at home, 
with a mere handful of men, a few thousand at most, engaged in 
scientific research, with their internal political systems in a state 
of tension or convulsive change, with a creaking economic system 
of the most provisional sort, and with their religions far gone in 
decay. They really believed that the vast populations of eastern 
Asia could be permanently subordinated to such a Europe. 

Even to-day there are many people who fail to gi-asp the es- 
sential facts of this situation. They do not realize that in 
Asia the average brain is not one whit inferior in quality to 
the average European brain; that history shows Asiatics to be 
as bold, as vigorous, as generous, as self-sacrificing, and as 
capable of strong collective action as Europeans, and that there 
are and must continue to be a great many more Asiatics than 
Europeans in the world. It has always been difficult to re- 
strain the leakage of knowledge from one population to another, 
and now it becomes impossible. Under modern conditions 
world-wide economic and educational equalization is in the 
long run inevitable. An intellectual and moral rally of the 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 989 

Asiatics is going ou at the present time. Tlie slight leeway of 
a century or so, a few decades may recover. At the present 
time, for example, for one Englishman who knows Chinese 
thoroughly, or has any intimate knowledge of Chinese life and 
thought, there are hundreds of Chinamen conversant with every- 
thing the English know. The balance of knowledge in favour 
of India may be even greater. To Britain, India sends stu- 
dents; to India, Britain sends officials, for the most part men 
untrained in scientific observation. There is no organization 
whatever for the sending of European students, as students, to 
examine and inquire into Indian history, archaeology, and cur- 
rent aifairs or for bringing learned Indians into contact with 
British students in Britain. 

Since the year 1898, the year of the seizure of Kiau-Chau 
by Germany and of Wei-hai-wei by Britain, and the year after 
the Russian taking of Port Arthur, events in China have moved 
more rapidly than in any other country except Japan. A great 
hatred of Europeans swept like a flame over China, and a po- 
litical society for the expulsion of Europeans, the Boxers, grew 
up and broke out into violence in 1900. This was an outbreak 
of rage and mischief on quite old-fashioned lines. In 1900 
the Boxers murdered 250 Europeans and, it is said, nearly 
30,000 Christians. China, not for the first time in history, 
was under the sway of a dowager empress. She was an igno- 
rant woman, but of great force of character and in close sym- 
pathy with the Boxers. She supported them, and protected 
those who perpetrated outrages on the Europeans. All that 
again is what might have happened in 500 b.c. or thereabouts 
against the Huns. 

Things came to a crisis in 1900. The Boxers became more 
and more threatening to the Europeans in China. Attempts 
were made to send up additional European guards to the Peking 
legations, but this only precipitated matters. The German 
minister was shot down in the streets of Peking by a soldier of 
the imperial guard. The rest of the foreign representatives 
gathered together and made a fortification of the more favour- 
ably situated legations and stood a siege of two months. A 
combined allied force of 20,000 under a German general then 
marched up to Peking and relieved the legations, and the old 
Empress fled to Sian-fu, the old capital of Tai-tsung. Some 
of the European troops committed grave atrocities upon the 



990 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Chinese civil population.^ That brings one up to about the level 
of 1850, let us say. 

There followed the practical annexation of Manchuria by 
Kussia, a squabble among the pov^ers, and in 1904 a British 
invasion of Tibet, hitherto a forbidden country. But w^hat did 
not appear on the surface of these events, and what made all 
these events fundamentally different, was that China now con- 
tained a considerable number of able people who had a Euro- 
pean education and European knowledge. The Boxer Insur- 
rection subsided, and then the influence of this new factor 
began to appear in talk of a constitution (1906), in the sup- 
pression of opium-smoking, and in educational reforms. A con- 
stitution of the Japanese type came into existence in 1909, 
making China a limited monarchy. But China is not to be 
moulded to the Japanese pattern, and the revolutionary stir con- 
tinued. Japan, in her own reorganization, and in accordance 
with her temperament, had turned her eyes to the monarchist 
west, but China was looking across the Pacific. In 1911 the 
essential Chinese revolution began. In 1912 the emperor abdi- 
cated, and the greatest community in the world became a repub- 
lic. The overthrow of the emperor was also the overthrow of the 
Manchus, and the Mongolian pigtail, which had been worn by 
the Chinese since lG-14, ceased to be compulsory. It continues, 
however, to be worn by a large proportion of the popiilation. 

At the present time it is probable that there is more good 
brain matter and more devoted men working out the moderniza- 
tion and the reorganization of the Chinese civilization than we 
should find directed to the welfare of any single European 
people. China will presently have a modernized practicable 
script, a press, new and vigorous modern universities, a reor- 
ganized industrial system, and a growing body of scientific and 
economic inquiry. The natural industry and ingenuity of her 
vast population will be released to co-operate upon terms of 
equality with the Western world. She may have great internal 
difficulties ahead of her yet ; of that no man can judge. Never- 
theless, the time may not be very distant wdien the Federated 
States of China may be at one with the United States of Amer- 
ica and a pacified and reconciled Europe in upholding the 
organized peace of the world. 

*See Putnam Weale's Indiscreet Letters from Pekin, a partly fictitious 
book, but true and vivid in its effects. 



] THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 991 

§ 11 

The pioneer countryj however, in the recovery of the Asiatic 
peoples was not China, bnt Japan. We have ontrun our story 
in telling of China. Hitherto Japan has played but a small part 
in this history; her secluded civilization has not contributed 
very largely to the general shaping of human destinies ; she 
has received much, but she has given little. The original in- 
habitants of the Japanese Islands were probably, a northern peo- 
ple with remote Nordic affinities, the Hairy Ainu. But the 
Japanese proper are of the Mongolian race. Physically they 
resemble the Amerindians, and there are many curious re- 
semblances between the prehistoric pottery and so forth of 
Japan and similar Peruvian products. It is not impossible that 
they are a back-flow from the trans-Pacific drift of the early 
heliolithic culture, but they may also have absorbed from the 
south a Malay and even a ISTegrito element. 

Whatever the origin of the Japanese, there can be no doubt 
that their civilization, their writing, and their literary and 
artistic traditions are derived from the Chinese. They were 
emerging from barbarism in the second and third century of 
the Christian Era, and one of their earliest acts as a people 
outside their own country was an invasion of Korea under a 
queen Jingo, who seems to have played a large part in estab- 
lishing their civilization. Their history is an interesting and 
romantic one; they developed a feudal system and a tradition 
of chivalry ; their attacks upon Korea and China are an Eastern 
equivalent of the English wars in France. Japan was first 
brought into contact with Europe in the sixteenth century ; in 
1542 some Portuguese reached it in a Chinese junk, and in 1549 
a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, began his teaching there. 
The Jesuit accounts describe a country greatly devastated by 
perpetual feudal war. For a time Japan welcomed European 
intercourse, and the Christian missionaries made a great num- 
ber of converts. A certain William Adams, of Gillingham, in 
Kent, became the most trusted European adviser of the Japa- 
nese, and showed them how to build big ships. There were 
voyages in Japanese-built ships to India and Peru. Then arose 
complicated quarrels between the Spanish Dominicans, the 
Portuguese Jesuits, and the English and Dutch Protestants, 
each warning the Japanese against the evil political designs of 



992 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the others. The Jesuits, in a phase of ascendancy, persecuted 
and insulted the Buddhists with great acrimony. These troubles 
interwove with the feudal conflicts of the time. In the end the 
Japanese came to the conclusion that the Europeans and their 
Christianity were an intolerable nuisance, and that Catholic 
Christianity in particular was a mere cloak for the political 
dreams of the Pope and the Spanish monarchy — already in 
possession of the Philippine Islands ; there was a great and 
conclusive persecution of the Christians, and in 1638 Japan 
with the exception of one wretched Dutch factory on the minute 
island of Deshima in the harbour of Nagasaki 'was absolutely 
closed to Europeans, and remained closed for over 200 years. 
The Dutch on Deshima were exposed to almost unendurable 
indignities. They had no intercourse with any Japanese except 
the special officials appointed to deal with them. During those 
two centuries the Japanese remained as completely cut off from 
the rest of the world as though they lived upon another planet. 
It was forbidden to build any ship larger than a mere coasting 
boat. No Japanese could go abroad, and no European enter 
the country. 

For two centuries Japan remained outside the main current 
of history. She lived on in a state of picturesque feudalism 
enlivened by blood feuds, in which about five per cent, of the 
population, the samurai, or fighting men, and the nobles and 
their families, tyrannized without restraint over the rest of the 
population. All common men knelt when a noble passed ; to 
betray the slightest disrespect was to risk being slashed to death 
by his samurai. The elect classes lived lives of romantic adven- 
ture without one redeeming gleam of novelty; they loved, 
murdered, and pursued fine points of honour — which probably 
bored the intelligent ones extremely. We can imagine the 
wretchedness of a curious mind, tormented by the craving 
for travel and knowledge, cooped up in these islands of empty 
romance. 

Meanwhile the great world outside went on to wider visions 
and new powers. Strange shipping became more frequent, pass- 
ing the Japanese headlands; sometimes ships were wrecked and 
sailors brought ashore. Through the Dutch settlement at 
Deshima, their one link with the outer universe, came warnings 
that Japan was not keeping pace with the power of the Western 
world. In 1837 a ship sailed into Yedo Bay flying a strange 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 993 

flag of stz;ipes and stars, and carrying some Japanese sailors 
she had picked up far adrift in the Pacific. She was driven off 
by a cannon shot. This flag presently reappeared on other ships. 
One in 1849 came to demand the liberation of eighteen ship- 
wrecked American sailors. Then in 1853 came four American 
warships under Commodore Perry, and refused to be driven 
away. He lay at anchor in forbidden waters, and sent messages 
to the two rulers who at that time shared the control of Japan. 
In 1854 he returned with ten ships, amazing ships propelled 
by steam, and equipped with big guns, and he made proposals 
for trade and intercourse that the Japanese had no power to 
resist. He landed with a guard of 500 men to sign the treaty. 
Incredulous crowds watched this visitation from the outer world, 
marching through the streets. 

Russia, Holland, and Britain followed in the wake of Amer- 
ica. Foreigners entered the country, and conflicts between them 
and Japanese gentlemen of spirit ensued. A British subject 
was killed in a street brawl, and a Japanese town was bom- 
barded by the British (1863). A great nobleman whose estates 
commanded the Straits of Shimonoseki saw fit to fire on foreign 
vessels, and a second bombardment by a fleet of British, French, 
Dutch, and American warships destroyed his batteries and scat- 
tered his swordsmen. Finally an allied squadron (1865), at 
anchor off Kioto, imposed a ratification of the treaties which 
opened Japan to the world. 

The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense, 
and it would seem that the salvation of peoples lies largely in 
such humiliations. With astonishing energy and intelligence 
they set themselves to bring their culture and organization up 
to the level of the European powers. Never in all the history 
of mankind did a nation make such a stride as Japan then did. 
In 1866 she was a mediteval people, a fantastic caricature of 
the extremist romantic feudalism ; in 1899 hers was a completely 
Westernized people, on a level with the most advanced Euro- 
pean powers, and well in advance of Russia. She completely 
dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way 
hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European progress 
seem sluggish and tentative by comparison. 

We cannot tell here in any detail of Japan's war with China 
in 1894-95. It demonstrated the extent of her Westernization. 
She had an efficient Westernized army and a small but sound 



994 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

fleet. But tlie significance of her renascence, tlioiagh it was 
appreciated by Britain and the United States, who were already 
treating her as if she were a European state, was not under- 
stood by the other Great Powers engaged in the pursuit of new 
Indias in Asia. Russia was pushing down through Manchuria 
to Korea, France was already established far to the south in 
Tonkin and Annam, Germany was prowling hungrily on the 
look-out for some settlement. The three powers combined to 
prevent Japan reaping any fruits from the Chinese war, and 
particularly from establishing herself on the mainland at the 
points commanding the Japan Sea. She was exhausted by 
her war with China, and they threatened her with war. 

In 1898 Germany descended upon China, and, making the 
murder of two missionaries her excuse, annexed a portion of 
the province of Shang-tung. Thereupon Russia seized the Liao- 
tung peninsula, and extorted the consent of China to an exten- 
sion of her trans-Siberian railway to Port Arthur; and in 1900 
she occupied Manchuria. Britain was unable to resist the imita- 
tive impulse, and seized the port of Wei-hai-wei (1898). How 
alarming these movements must have been to every intelligent 
Japanese a glance at the map will show. They led to a war 
v/ith Russia which marks an epoch in the history of Asia, the 
close of the period of European arrogance. The Russian people 
were, of course, innocent and ignorant of this trouble that was 
being made for them half-way round the world, and the wiser 
Russian statesmen were against these foolish thrusts ; but a gang 
of financial adventurers surrounded the Tsar, including the 
Grand Dukes, his cousins. They had gambled deeply in the 
prospective looting of Manchuria and China, and they would 
suffer no withdrawal. So there began a transportation of great 
armies of Japanese soldiers across the sea to Port Arthur and 
Korea, and the sending of endless trainloads of Russian peas- 
ants along the Siberian railway to die in those distant 
battlefields. 

The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were 
beaten on sea and land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed 
round Africa to be utterly destroyed in the Straits of Tshu- 
shima. A revolutionary movement among the common people 
of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless slaughter, 
obliged the Tsar to end the war (1905) ; he returned the south- 
ern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875, 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



995 




996 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The White 
Man was beginning to drop his load in eastern Asia. For some 
years, however, Germany remained in uneasy possession of 
Kiau-Chau. 

§ 12 

We have already noted how the enterprise of Italy in Abys- 
sinia had been checked at the terrible battle of Adowa (1896). 
in which over 3,000 Italians were killed and more than 4,000 
taken prisoner. The phase of imperial expansion at the expense 
of organized non-European states was manifestly drawing to a 
close. It had entangled the quite sufficiently difficult political 
and social problems of Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ger- 
many, and Eussia with the affairs of considerable alien, un- 
assimilable, and resentful populations ; Great Britain had Egvpt 
(not formally annexed as yet), India, Burmah, and a variety 
of such minor problems as Malta and Shanghai ; France had 
cumbered herself with Tonkin and Annam in addition to Algiers 
and Tunis ; Spain was newly entangled in Morocco ; Italy had 
found trouble for herself in Tripoli ; and German overseas im- 
perialism, though its "place in the sun" seemed a poor one, 
derived what satisfaction it could from the thought of a prospec- 
tive war with Japan over Kiau-Chau. All these "subject" lands 
had populations at a level of intelligence and education very 
little lower than those of the possessing country ; the develop- 
ment of a native press, of a collective self-consciousness, and of 
demands for self-government was in each case inevitable, and 
the statesmen of Europe had been far too busy achieving these 
empires to have any clear ideas of what they would do with 
them when they got them. 

The Western democracies, as they woke up to freedom, dis- 
covered themselves "imperial," and were considerably em- 
barrassed by the discovery. The East came to the Western capi- 
tals with perplexing demands. In London the common English- 
man, much preoccupied by strikes, by economic riddles, by 
questions of nationalization, municipalization, and the like, 
found that his path was crossed and his public meetings at- 
tended by a large and increasing number of swarthy gentlemen 
in turbans, fezes, and other strange headgear, all saying in 
effect : "You have got us. The people who represent your gov- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 997 

prnment have destroyed our own govenime'iit, and prevent us 
from making a new one. What are you going to do with us ?" 



§ 13 

We may note here briefly the very various nature of the con- 
stituents of the British Empire in 1914. It was and is a quite 
unique political combination; nothing of the sort has ever 
existed before. 

First and central to the whole system was the ''crowned re- 
public" of the United British Kingdoms, including (against 
the will of a considerable part of the Irish people) Ireland. 
The majority of the British Parliament, made up of the three 
united parliaments of England, Scotland, and Ireland, deter- 
mines the headship, the quality and policy of the ministry, and 
determines it largely on considerations arising out of British 
domestic politics. It is this ministry which is the effective 
supreme government, with powers of peace and war, over all 
the rest of the empire. 

Next in order of political importance to the British States 
were the '^crowned republics" of Australia, Canada, JSTew- 
foundland (the oldest British possession, 1583), JSTew Zealand, 
and South Africa, all practically independent and self- 
governing states in alliance with Great Britain, but each with 
a representative of the Crown appointed by the Government 
in office ; 

Next the Indian Empire, an extension of the empire of the 
Great Mogul, with its dependent and "protected" states reach- 
ing now from Baluchistan to Burmah, and including Aden, in 
all of which empire the British Crown and the Indian Office 
(under Parliamentary control) played the role of the original 
Turkoman dynasty; 

Then the ambiguous possession of Egypt, still nominally a 
part of the Turkish Empire and still retaining its own monarch, 
the Khedive, but imder almost despotic British official rule ; 

Then the still more ambiguous "Anglo-Egyptian" Sudan prov- 
ince, occupied and administered jointly by the British and by 
the (British controlled) Egyptian Government; 

Then a number of partially self-goveraing communities, some 
British in origin and some not, with elected legislatures and 



998 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

an appointed executive, such as Malta/ Jamaica, the Bahamas, 
and Bermuda ; 

Then the Crown colonies, in which the rule of the British 
Home Government (through the Colonial Office) verged on 
autocracy, as in Ceylon, Trinidad, and Fiji (where there was 
an appointed council), and Gibraltar and St. Helena (where 
there was a governor) ; 

Then great areas of (chiefly) tropical lands, raw-product 
areas, with politically w^ealc and under-civilized native commu- 
nities, wdiich were nominally protectorates, and administered 
either by a High Commissioner set over native chiefs (as in 
Basutoland) or over a chartered company (as in Rhodesia). In 
some cases the Foreign Office, in some cases the Colonial Office, 
and in some cases the India Office had been concerned in acquir- 
ing the possessions that fell into this last and least definite class 
of all, but for the most part the Colonial Office was now 
responsible for them. 

It will be manifest, therefore, that no single office and no 
single brain had ever comprehended the British Empire as a 
whole. It was a mixture of growths and accumulations entirely 
different from anything that has ever been called an empire 
before. It -guaranteed a wide peace and security; that is why 
it was endured and sustained by many men of the "subject" 
races — in spite of official t^^-annies and insufficiencies, and of 
much negligence on the part of the "home" public. Like the 
"Athenian empire," it was an overseas empire ; its ways were 
sea w^ays, and its common link w^as the British ISTavy. Like all 
empires, its cohesion was dependent physically upon a method 
of communication ; the development of seamanship, ship-build- 
ing, and steamships between the sixteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies had made it a possible and convenient Pax — the "Pax 
Britannica," and fresh developments of air or swift land trans- 
port or of undersea warfare might at any time make it incon- 
venient or helplessly insecure, 

^A new and much more liberal Maltese constitution was promulgated 
in June, 1920, practically putting Malta on the footing of a self-governing 
colony. 



THE NINETEExNTH CENTURY 



999 




XXXIX 

THE INTERInTATIOXAL CATASTROPHE OF 1914 

§ 1. The Armed Peace Before the Great ^yar. § 2. Imperial 
Germany. § 3. The Spirit of Imperialism in Britain and 
Ireland. % 4. Imperialism in France, Italy, and the Balkans. 
§ 5. Eussia a Grand Monarchy. § 6. The United States 
and the Imperial Idea. § 7. The Immediate Causes of the 
Great War. § 8. A Summary of the Great War Up to 1917. 
§ 9. The Great War from the Russian Collapse to the Armis- 
tice. § 10. The Political, Economical, and Social Disorgani- 
zation Caused hy the War. § 11. President Wilson and the 
Problems of Versailles. § 12. Summary of the First Cove- 
nant of the League of Nations. § 13. A General Outline of 
the Treaties of' 1919 and 1920. 

§ 1 

FOR thirtv-six years after the Treaty of San Stefano and 
the Berlin Conference, Europe maintained an uneasy 
peace within its borders ; there was no war between any 
of the leading states during this period. They jostled, brow- 
beat, and threatened one another, but they did not come to 
actual hostilities. There was a general realization after 1871 
that modern war was a much more serious thing than the pro 
fessional warfare of the eighteenth century, an effort of peoples 
as a whole that might strain the social fabric very severely, an 
adventure not to be rashly embarked upon. The mechanical 
revolution was giving constantly more powerful (and expensive) 
weapons by land and sea, and more rapid methods of transport ; 
and making it more and more impossible to carry on warfare 
without a complete dislocation of the economic life of the com- 
munity. Even the foreign offices felt the fear of war. 

But though war was dreaded as it had never been dreaded 
in the world before, nothing was done in the way of setting up 

1000 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1001 

a federal control to prevent human affairs drifting towards war. 
In 1898, it is true, the young Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) 
issued a rescript inviting the other Great Powers to a confer- 
ence of states ''seeking to make the great idea of universal 
peace triumph over the elements of trouble and discord." His 
rescript recalls the declaration of his predecessor, Alexander I, 
which gave its tone to the Holy Alliance, and it is vitiated by 
the same assumption that peace can be established between sov- 
ereign governments rather than by a broad appeal to the needs 
and rights of the one people of mankind. The lesson of the 
United States of America, which showed that there could be 
neither unity of action nor peace until the thought ot the "people 
of Virginia'' and the "people of Massachusetts" had been swept 
aside by the thought of the "people of the United States," went 
entirely disregarded in the European attempts at pacification. 
Two conferences were held at The HagTie in Holland, one in 
1899 and another in 1907, and at the second nearly all the 
sovereign states of the world were represented. They were 
represented diplomatically, there was no direction of the general 
intelligence of the world to their deliberations, the ordinary 
common man did not even know that these conferences were 
sitting, and for the most part the assembled representatives 
haggled cunningly upon points of international law affecting 
war, leaving aside the abolition of war as a chima?ra. These 
Hague Conferences did nothing to dispel the idea that inter- 
national life is necessarily competitive. They accepted that idea. 
They did nothing to develo]) the consciousness of a world com- 
monweal overriding sovereigns and foreign offices. The interna- 
tional lawyers and statesmen who attended these gatherings were 
as little disposed to hasten on a world commonweal on such a 
basis as were the Prussian statesmen of 1848 to welcome an all- 
German parliament overriding the rights and "policy" of the 
King of Prussia. 

In America a series of three Pan-American conferences in 
1889, 1901, and 1906 went some way towards the development 
of a scheme of international arbitration for the whole American 
continent. 

The character and good faith of Nicholas II, who initiated 
these Hague gatherings, we will not discuss at any length here. 
He may have thought that time was on the side of Kussia. But 
of the general unwillingness of the Great Powers to face the 



1002 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

prospect of a merger of sovereign powers, without wliicli perma- 
nent peace projects are absurd, there can be no sort of doubt 
whatever. It was no cessation of international competition with 
its acute phase of war that they desired, but rather a cheapening 
of war, which was becoming too costly. Each wanted to econo- 
mize the wastage of minor disputes and conflicts, and to establish 
international laws that would embarrass its more formidable 
opponents in war-time without incommoding itself. These were 
the practical ends they sought at the Hague Conference. It 
was a gathering they attended to please Nicholas II, just as the 
monarchs of Europe had subscribed to the evangelical proposi- 
tions of the Holy iVlliance to please Alexander I ; and as they 
had attended it, they tried to make what they conceived to be 
some use of it. 



The peace of Frankfort had left Germany Prussianized and 
united, the most formidable of all the Great Powers of Europe. 
France was humiliated and crippled. Her lapse into repub- 
licanism seemed likely to leave her without friends in any 
European court. Italy was as yet a mere stripling. Austria 
sank now rapidly to the position of a confederate in German 
policy. Kussia was vast, but undeveloped; and the British 
Empire was mighty only on the sea. Beyond Europe the one 
power to be reckoned with by Germany was the United States 
of America, growing now into a great industrial nation, but 
with no army nor navy worth considering by European 
standards. 

The new Germany which was embodied in the empire that 
had been created at Versailles was a complex and astonishing 
mixture of the fresh intellectual and material forces of the 
world, with the narrowest political traditions of the European 
system. She was vigorously educational ; she was by far the 
most educational state in the world ; she made the educational 
pace for all her neighbours and rivals. In this time of reckon- 
ing for Germany, it may help the British reader to a balanced 
attitude to recall the educational stimulation for which his coun- 
try has to thank first the German Prince Consort and then 
German competition. That mean jealousy of the educated 
common man on the part of the British ruling class, which no 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1003 

patriotic pride or generous impulse had ever sufficed to over- 
come, went down before a growing fear of German efficiency. 
And Germany took up tlie organization of scientific research 
and of the application of scientific method to industrial and 
social development with such a faith and energy as no other 
community had ever shown before. Throughout all this period 
of the armed peace she was reaping and sowing afresh and 
reaping again the harvests, the unfailing harvests, of freely 
disseminated knowledge. She grew swiftly to become a great 
manufacturing and trading power; her steel output outran the 
British ; in a hundred new fields of production and commerce, 
where intelligence and system was of more account than mere 
trader's cunning, in the manufacture of optical glass, of dyes 
and of a multitude of chemical products and in endless novel 
processes, she led the world. 

To the British manufacturer who was accustomed to see in- 
ventions come into his works, he knew not whence nor why, 
begging to be adopted, this new German method of keeping and 
paying scientific men seemed abominably unfair. It was com- 
pelling fortune, he felt. It was packing the cards. It was 
encouraging a nasty class of intellectuals to interfere in the 
affairs of sound business men. Science went abroad from its 
first home like an unloved child. The splendid chemical indus- 
try of Germany was built on the work of the Englishman Sir 
William Perkin, who could find no "practical" English business 
man to back him. And Germany also led the way in many 
forms of social legislation. Germany realized that labour is a 
national asset, that it deteriorates through unemployment, and 
that, for the common good, it has to be taken care of outside 
the works. The British employer was still under the delusion 
that labour had no business to exist outside the works, and that 
the worse such exterior existence was, the better somehow for 
him. Moreover, because of his general illiteracy, he was an 
intense individualist : his was the insenate rivalry of the vulgar 
mind ; he hated his fellow manufacturers about as much as ho 
hated his labour and his customers. German producers, on 
the other hand, were persuaded of the great advantages of 
combination and civility; their enterprises tended to flow 
together and assume more and more the character of national 
undertakings. 

This educating, scientific, and organizing Germany was the 



1004 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

natural develoi>ment of the liberal Germany of 1848 ; it had its 
roots far back in the recuperative effort that drew its impulse 
from the shame of the ISTapoleonic conquest. All that was good, 
all that was great in this modern Germany, she owed indeed 
to her schoolmasters. But this scientific organizing spirit was 
only one of the two factors that made up the new German 
Empire. The other factor was the Ilohenzollern monarchy 
which had survived Jena, which had tricked and bested the 
revolution of 1848, and which, under the guidance of Bismarck, 
had now clambered to the legal headship of all Germany out- 
side Austria. Except the Tsardom, no other European state 
had so preserved the tradition of the Grand Monarchy of the 
eighteenth century as the Prussian. Through the tradition of 
Frederick the Great, Machiavelli now reigned in Germany. In 
the head of this fine new modern state, therefore, there sat no 
fine modern brain to guide it to a world predominance in world 
service, but an old spider lusting for power. Prussianized Ger- 
many was at once the newest and the most antiquated thing in 
Western Europe. She was the best and the wickedest state of 
her time. 

The psychology of nations is still but a rudimentary science. 
Psychologists have scarcely begani to study the citizen side of 
the individual man. But it is of the utmost importance to our 
subject that the student of universal history should give some 
thought to the mental growth of the generations of Germans 
educated since the victories of 1871. They were naturally in- 
flated by their sweeping unqualified successes in war, and by 
their rapid progress from comparative poverty to wealth. It 
would have been more than human in them if they had not 
given way to some excesses of patriotic vanity. But this re- 
action was deliberately seized upon and fostered and devel- 
oped by a systematic exploitation and control of school and 
college, literature and press, in the interests of the Hohen- 
zollern dynasty. A teacher, a professor, who did not teach and 
preach, in and out of season, the racial, moral, intellectual, and 
physical superiority of the Germans to all other peoples, their 
extraordinary devotion to war and their dynasty, and their 
inevitable destiny under that dynasty to lead the world, was 
a marked man, doomed to failure and obscurity. German his- 
torical teaching became an immense systematic falsification of 
the human past, with a view to the Hohenzollern future. All 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1005 

other nations were represented as incompetent and decadent; 
tlie Prussians were the leaders and regenerators of mankind. 
The yonng German read this in his school-books, heard it in 
church, found it in his literature, had it poured into him with 
passionate conviction by his professor. It was ix)ured into 
him by all his professors; lecturers in biology or mathematics 
would break off from their proper subject to indulge in long 
passages of patriotic rant. Only minds of extraordinary tough- 
ness and originality could resist such a torrent of suggestion. 
Insensibly there was built up in the German mind a conception 
of Germany and its emperor as of something splendid and 
predominant as nothing else had ever been before, a godlike 
nation in "shining armour" brandishing the "good German 
sword" in a world of inferior — and very badly disposed — 
peoples. We have told our story of Europe; the reader may 
judge whether the glitter of the German sword is exceptionally 
blinding. Germania was deliberately intoxicated, she was sys- 
tematically kept drunk, with this sort of patriotic rhetoric. It 
is the greatest of the Hohenzollern crimes that the Crown con- 
stantly and persistently tampered with education, and partic- 
ularly with historical teaching. No other modern state has 
so sinned against education. The oligarchy of the crowned 
republic of Great Britain may have crippled and starved edu- 
cation, but the Hohenzollern monarchy corrupted and pros- 
tituted it. 

It cannot be too clearly stated, it is the most important fact 
in the history of the last half century, that the German people 
was methodically indoctrinated with the idea of a German 
world-predominance based on might, and with the theory that 
war was a necessary thing in life. The key to German his- 
torical teaching is to be found in Count Moltke's dictum : 
"Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful 
dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained 
by God." "Without war the world would stagnate and lose 
itself in materialism." And the anti-Christian German phi- 
losopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious 
field-marshal. "It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment," he 
observes, "to expect much (even anything at all) from man- 
kind if it forgets how to make war. As yet no means are known 
which call so much into action as a great war that rough energy 
born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that 



1006 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervour 
born of effort in tbe annihilation of the enemy, that proud 
indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fel- 
lows, that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs 
when it is losing its vitality." ^ 

This sort of teaching, which pei-vaded the German Empire 
from end to end, was bound to be noted abroad, bound to alarm 

every other power and 
people in the world, bound 
to provoke an anti-Ger- 
man confederation and it 
was accompanied by a 
parade of military, and 
pi'esently of naval, prepv- 
aration that threatened 
France, Russia, and Brit- 
ain alike. It affected the 
thoughts, the manners, 
and morals of the entire 
German people. After 
1871, the German abroad 
thrust out his chest and 
raised his voice. He threw 
a sort of trampling quality 
even into the operations of 
commerce. His machinery 
came on the markets of 
the world, his shipping 
took the seas with a splash 
of patriotic challenge. 
His very merits he used as 
a means of offence. (And probably most other peoples, if they 
had had the same experiences and undergone the same training, 
would have behaved in a similar manner.) 

By one of those accidents in history that personify and pre- 
cipitate catastrophes, the ruler of Germany, the emperor Wil- 
liam II, embodied the new education of his people and the 
Hohenzollern tradition in the completest form. He came to 
the throne in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine; his father, Fred- 

* These quotations are from Sir Thomas Barclay's article "Peace" in 
the Encyclopwdia Britannica. 




TVu2 Htuperor 'WHlianv IT. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1007 

erick III, had succeeded his grandfather, William I, in the 
March, to die in the Jnne of that year. William II was the 
grandson of Qneen Victoria on his mother's side, bnt his tem- 
perament showed no traces of the liberal German tradition 
that distinguished the Saxe-Cobnrg-Gotha family. Ilis head 
was fnll of the frothy stnff of the new imperialism. He 
signalized his accession by an address to his army and navy; 
his address to his people followed three days later. A high note 
of contempt for democracy was sonnded: ''The soldier and the 
army, not parliamentary majorities, have welded together the 
German Empire. JMy trust is placed in the army." So the 
patient work of the German schoolmasters was disowned, and 
the Ilohenzollern declared himself triumphant. 

The next exploit of the young monarch was to quarrel with 
the old chancellor, Bismarck, who had made the new German 
Empire, and to dismiss him (1890). There were no profound 
differences of opinion between them, but, as Bismarck said, the 
Emperor intended to be his own chancellor. 

These were the opening acts of an active and aggressive 
career. This William II meant to make a noise in the world, 
a louder noise than any other monarch had ever made. The 
whole of Europe was soon familiar with the figure of the new 
monarch, invariably in military uniform of the most glittering 
sort, staring valiantly, fiercely moustached, and with a withered 
left arm ingeniously minimised. He affected silver shining 
breastplates and long white cloaks. A great restlessness was 
manifest. It was clear he conceived himself destined for great 
things, but for a time it was not manifest what particular great 
things these were. There was no oracle at Delphi now to tell 
him that he was destined to destroy a great empire. 

The note of theatricality about him and the dismissal of 
Bismarck alarmed many of his subjects, but they were pres- 
ently reassured by the idea that he was using his influence in 
the cause of peace and to consolidate Germany. He travelled 
much, to London, Vienna, Rome^ — where he had private con- 
versations with the Pope — to Athens, where his sister married 
the king in 1889, and to Constantinople. He was the first 
Christian sovereign to be a Sultan's guest. He also went to 
Palestine. A special gate was knocked through the ancient wall 
of Jerusalem so that he could ride into that place ; it was be- 
neath his dignity to walk in. He induced the Sultan to com- 



1008 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

mence the reorganization of the Turkish Army upon German 
lines and under German officers. In 1895 he announced that 
Germany was a 'Vorld power," and that "the future of Ger- 
many lay upon the water" — regardless of the fact that the 
British considered that they were there already — and he began 
to interest himself more and more in the building up of a great 
navy. He also took German art and literature under his care ; 
he used his influence to retain the distinctive and blinding- 
German blackletter against the Roman type used by the rest 
of western Europe, and he supported the Pan-German move- 
ment, which claimed the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Flemish 
Belgians, and the German Swiss as members of a great German 
brotherhood— as in fact good assimilable stuff for a hungry 
young empire which meant to grow. All other monarchs in 
Europe paled before him. 

He used the general hostility against Britain aroused through- 
out Europe by the war against the Boer Republics to press for- 
ward his schemes for a great navy, and this, together with the 
rapid and challenging extension of the German colonial em- 
pire in Africa and the Pacific Ocean, alarmed and irritated 
the British extremely. British liberal opinion in particular 
found itself under the exasperating necessity of supporting an 
ever-increasing British Navy. '^I will not rest," he said, ''until 
I have brought my navy to the same height at which my army 
stands." T; 
that threat. 

In 1890 he had acquired the small island of Heligoland from 
Britain. This he made into a great naval fortress. 

As his navy grew, his enterprise increased. He proclaimed 
the Germans "the salt of the earth." They must not "weary 
in the work of civilization ; Germany, like the spirit of Im- 
perial Rome, must expand and impose itself." This he said 
on Polish soil, in support of the steady efforts the Germans 
were making to suppress the Polish language and culture, and 
to Germanize their share of Poland. God he described as his 
"Divine Ally." In the old absolutisms the monarch was either 
God himself or the adopted agent of God ; the Kaiser took 
God for his trusty henchman. "Our old God," he said af- 
fectionately. When the Germans seized Kiau-Chau, he spoke 
of the German "mailed fist." When he backed Austria against 
Russia, he talked of Germany in her "shining armour." 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1009 

The disasters of Eussia in Manchuria in 1905 released the 
spirit of German imperialism to bolder aggressions. The fear 
of a joint attack from France and Eussia seemed lifting. The 
emperor made a kind of regal progress through the Holy Land, 
landed at Tangier to assure the Sultan of Morocco of his sup- 
port against the French, and inflicted upon France the crown- 
ing indignity of compelling her by a threat of war to dismiss 
Delcasse, her foreign minister. He drew tighter the links be- 
tween Austria and Gennany, and in 1908, Austria, with his 
support, defied the rest of Europe by annexing from the Turk 
the Yugo-Slav provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. So by 
his naval challenge to Britain and these aggressions upon France 
and the Slavs he forced Britain, France, and Eussia into a 
defensive understanding against him. The Bosnian annexa- 
tion had the further effect of estranging Italy, which had 
hitherto been his ally. 

Such was the personality that the evil fate of Germany 
set over her to stimulate, organize, and render intolerable to 
the rest of the world the natural pride and self-assertion of 
a great people who had at last, after long centuries of 
division and weakness, escaped from a jungle of princes to 
unity and the world's respect. It was natural that the 
commercial and industrial leaders of this new Germany 
who were now getting rich, the financiers intent upon over- 
seas exploits, the officials and the vulgar, should find this 
leader very much to their taste. Many Germans who thought 
him rash or tawdry in their secret hearts, supported him 
publicly because he had so taking an air of success. Hack der 
Kaiser! 

Yet Germany did not yield itself without a struggle to the 
strong-flowing tide of imperialism. Important elements in Ger- 
man life stniggled against this swaggering new autocracy. The 
old German nations, and particularly the Bavarians, refused 
to be swallowed up in Prussianism. And with the spread of 
education and the rapid industrialization of Germany, organ- 
ized labour developed its ideas and a steady antagonism to the 
military and patriotic clattering of its ruler. A new political 
party was growing up in the state, the Social Democrats, pro- 
fessing the doctrines of Marx. In the teeth of the utmost oppo- 
sition from the official and clerical organizations, and of vio- 
lently repressive laws against its propaganda and against com- 



1010 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

binations, this party grew. The Kaiser denounced it again and 
again ; its leaders were sent to prison or driven abroad. Still 
it grew. When he came to the throne it polled not half a mil- 
lion votes; in 1907 it polled over three million. He attempted 
to concede many things, old age and sickness insurance, for 
example, as a condescending gift, things which it claimed for 
the workers as their right. His conversion to socialism was 
noted, but it gained no converts to imperialism. His naval 
ambitions were ably and bitterly denounced; the colonial 
adventures of the new German capitalists were incessantly 
attacked by this party of the common sense of the common 
man. But to the army, the Social Democrats accorded a 
moderate support, because, much as they detested their home- 
grown autocrat, they hated and dreaded the barbaric and 
retrogi'essive autocracy of Russia on their eastern frontier 
more. 

The danger plainly before Germany was that this swagger- 
ing imperialism would compel Britain, Russia, and France into 
a combined attack upon her, an offensive-defensive. The Kai- 
ser wavered between a stiff attitude towards Britain and clumsy 
attempts to propitiate her, while his fleet grew and while he 
prepared for a preliminary struggle with Russia and France. 
When in 1913 the British government proposed a cessation on 
either hand of naval construction for a year, it was refused. 
The Kaiser was afflicted with a son and heir more Hohenzollern, 
more imperialistic, more Pan-Germanic than his father. He 
had been nurtured upon imperialist propaganda. His toys 
•had been soldiers and guns. He snatched at a premature pop- 
ularity by outdoing his father's patriotic and aggTCSsive atti- 
tudes. His father, it was felt, was growing middle-aged and 
over-careful. The Crown Prince renewed him. Germany had 
never been so strong, never so ready for a new great adventure 
and another harvest of victories. The Russians, he was in- 
structed, were decayed, the French degenerate, the British on 
the verge of civil war. This young Crown Prince was but a 
sample of the abounding upper-class youth of Germany in the 
spring of 1914. They had all drunken from the same cup. 
Their professors and teachers, their speakers and leaders, their 
mothers and sweethearts, had been preparing them for the gi-eat 
occasion that was now very nearly at hand. They were full of 
the tremulous sense of imminent conflict, of a trumpet call to 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 19U lOll 

stupendous achievements, of victory over mankind abroad, tri- 
umph over the recalcitrant workers at home. The country was 
taut and excited like an athletic competitor at the end of his 
training. 

§ 3 

Throughout the period of the armed peace Germany was 
making: the pace and setting the tone for the rest of Europe. 
The influence of her new doctrines of aggressive imperialism 
was particularly strong upon the British mind, which was ill- 
equipped to resist a strong intellectual thrust from abroad. 
The educational impulse the Prince Consort had given had died 
away after his death ; the universities of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge were hindered in their task of effective revision of 
upper-class education by the fears and prejudices the so-called 
''conflict of science and religion" had roused in the clergy who' 
dominated them through Convocation ; popular education was 
crippled by religious squabbling, by the extreme parsimony of 
the public authorities, by the desire of employers for child la- 
bour, and by individualistic objection to "educating other peo- 
ple's children." The old tradition of the English, the tradition 
of plain statement, legality, fair play, and a certain measure 
of republican freedom had faded considerably during the 
stresses of the Napoleonic wars ; romanticism, of which Sir 
Walter Scott, the great novelist, was the chief promoter, had 
infected the national imagination with a craving for the florid 
and picturesque. "Mr. Briggs," the comic Englishman of 
Punch in the fifties and sixties, getting himself into highland 
costume and stalking deer, was fairly representative of the 
spirit of the new movement. It presently dawned upon Mr. 
Briggs as a richly coloured and credible fact he had hitherto 
not observed, that the sun never set on his dominions. The 
country which had once put Clive and Warren Hastings on 
trial for their unrighteous treatment of Indians, was now per- 
suaded to regard them as entirely chivalrous and devoted fig- 
ures. They were "empire builders." Under the spell of Dis- 
raeli's Oriental imagination, which had made Queen Vic- 
toria "empress," the Englishman turned readily enough to- 
wards the vague exaltations of modern imperialism. 

The perverted ethnology and distorted history which was 



1012 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

persuading the mixed Slavic, Keltic, and Teutonic Germans 
that they were a wonderful race apart, was imitated by Eng- 
lish writers who began to exalt a new ethnological invention, the 
''Anglo-Saxon," This remarkable compound was presented as 
the culmination of humanity, the crown and reward of the ac- 
cumulated effort of Greek and Eoman, Egyptian, Assyrian, 
Jew, Mongol, and such-like lowly precursors of its white splen- 
dour. The senseless legend of German superiority did much to 
exacerbate the irritations of the Poles in Posen and the French 
in Lorraine. The even more ridiculous legend of the superior 
Anglo-Saxon did not merely increase the irritations of English 
rule in Ireland, but it lowered the tone of British dealings with 
"subject" peoples throughout the entire world. For the cessa- 
tion of respect and the cultivation of ''superior" ideas are 
the cessation of civility and justice. 

The imitation of German patriotic misconceptions did not 
"end with this "Anglo-Saxon" fabrication. The clever young- 
men at the British universities in the eighties and nineties, 
bored by the flatness and insincerities of domestic politics, were 
moved to imitation and rivalry by this new teaching of an arro- 
gant, subtle, and forceful nationalist imperialism, this com- 
bination of Machiavelli and Attila, which was being imposed 
upon the thought and activities of young Gemiany. Britain, 
too, they thought, must have her shining armour and wave her 
good sword. The new British imperialism found its poet in 
Mr. Kipling and its practical support in a number of financial 
and business interests whose way to monopolies and exploita- 
tions was lighted by its glow. These Prussianizing English- 
men carried their imitation of Germany to the most extraor- 
dinary lengths. Central Europe is one continuous economic 
system, best worked as one ; and the new Germany had achieved 
a great customs union, a Zollverein of all its constituents. It 
became naturally one compact system, like a clenched fist. The 
British Empire sprawled like an open hand throughout the 
world, its members different in nature, need, and relationship, 
with no common interest except the common guarantee of 
safety. But the new Imperialists were blind to that difference. 
If new Germany had a Zollverein, then the British Empire 
must be in the fashion ; and the natural development of its 
various elements must be hampered everywhere by "imperial 
preferences" and the like. . . . 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1013 

Yet the imperialist movement iu Great Britain never had 
the authority nor the unanimity it had in Germany. It was 
not a natural product of any of the three united but diverse 
British peoples. It was not congenial to them. Queen Victoria 
and her successors, Edward VII and George V, were indis- 
posed, either by temperament or tradition, to wear ^'shining 
armour," shake "mailed fists," and flourish "good swords" in 
the Hohenzollern fashion. They had the wisdom to refrain 
from any overt meddling with public ideas. And this "Brit- 
ish" imperialist movement had from the first aroused the hos- 
tility of the large number of English, Welsh, Irish, and Scotch 
writers who refused to recognize this new "British" nationality 
or to accept the theory that they were these "Anglo-Saxon" 
supermen. And many great interests in Britain, and notably 
the shipping interest, had been built up upon free trade, and 
regarded the fiscal proposals of the new imperialists, and the 
new financial and mercantile adventurers with whom they were 
associated, with a justifiable suspicion. On the other hand, 
these ideas ran like wildfire through the military class, through 
Indian officialdom and the like. Hitherto there had always 
been something apologetic about the army man in England, 
He was not native to that soil. Here was a movement that 
promised to make him as splendidly important as his Prussian 
brother in arms. And the imperialist idea also found support 
in the cheap popular press that was now coming into existence 
to cater for the new stratum of readers created by elementary 
education. This press wanted plain, bright, simple ideas 
adapted to the needs of readers who had scarcely begun to think. 

In spite of such support, and its strong appeal to national 
vanity, British imperialism never saturated the mass of the 
British peoples. The English are not a mentally docile people, 
and the noisy and rather forced enthusiasm for imperialism and 
higher tariffs of the old Tory Party, the army class, the country 
clergy, the music-halls, the assimilated alien, the vulgar rich 
and the new large employers, inclined the commoner sort, and 
particularly organized labour, to a suspicious attitude. If the 
continually irritated sore of the Majuba defeat permitted the 
country to be rushed into the needless, toilsome, and costly 
conquest of the Boer republics in South Africa, the strain of 
that adventure produced a sufficient reaction towards decency 
and justice to reinstate the Liberal Party in power, and to 



iOU THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

undo the worst of that mischief by the creation of a South 
African confederation. Considerable advances continued to 
be made in popular education, and in the recovery of public 
interests and the general wealth from the i>ossession of the 
few. And in these years of the armed peace, the three British 
peoples came very near to a settlement, on fairly just and rea- 
sonable lines, of their long-standing misunderstanding with 
Ireland. The great war, unluckily for them, overtook them in 
the very crisis of this eiiort. 

Like Japan, Ireland has figTired but little in this Outline of 
History, and for the same reason, because she is an extreme 
island country, receiving much, but hitherto giving but little 
back into the general drama. Her population is a very mixed 
one, its basis, and probably its main substance, being of the dark 
"Mediterranean" strain, pre-Nordic and pre-Aryan, like the 
Basques and the people of Portugal and south Italy. Over 
this original basis there flowed, about the sixth century b.c. — 
we do not know to what degree of submergence — a wave of 
Keltic peoples, in at least sufficient strength to establish a 
Keltic language, the Irish Gaelic. There were comings and 
goings, invasions and counter-invasions of this and that Keltic 
or Kelticized people between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and 
England. The island was Christianized in the fifth century. 
Later on the east coast was raided and settled by Northmen, 
but we do not know to what extent they altered the racial 
quality. The Norman-English came in 1169, in the time of 
Henry II and onward. The Teutonic strain may be as strong 
or stronger than the Keltic in modern Ireland. Hitherto 
Ireland had been a tribal and barbaric country, with a few 
centres of security wherein the artistic tendencies of the more 
ancient race found scope in metal-work and the illumination 
of holy books. Now, in the twelfth century, there was an im- 
perfect conquest by the English Crown, and scattered settlements 
by Normans and English in various parts of the country. From 
the outset profound temperamental differences between the 
Irish and English were manifest, differences exacerbated by 
a difference of language, and these became much more evident 
after the Protestant Reformation. The English became Prot- 
estant ; the Irish by a natural reaction rallied about the per- 
secuted Catholic church. 

The English rule in Ireland had been from the first an in- 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1015 

termittent civil war due to the class of languages and the dif- 
ferent laws of land tenure and inheritance of the two peoples. 
The rebellions, massacres, and subjugations of the unhappy 
island during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I we cannot 
tell of here; but under James came a new discord with the 
confiscation of large areas of Ulster and their settlement with 
Presbyterian Scotch colonists. They formed a Protestant com- 
munity in necessary permanent conflict with the Catholic re- 
mainder of Ireland. 

In the political conflicts during the reign of Charles I and 
the Commonweal, and of James II and William and ]\[ary, 
the two sides in English affairs found sympathizers and allies 
in the Irish parties. There is a saying in Ireland that Eng- 
land's misfortune is Ireland's opportunity, and the English 
civil trouble that led to the execution of Strafford was the occa- 
sion also of a massacre of the English in Ireland (1641). Later 
on CromweJl was to avenge that massacre by giving no quarter 
to any men found under arms, a severity remembered by the 
Irish Catholics with extreme bitterness. Between 1G89 and 
1691 Ireland was again torn by civil war. James II sought 
the support of the Irish Catholics against William III, and 
his adherents were badlv beaten at the battles of the Boyne 
(1690) and Aughrim (1691). 

There was a settlement, the Treaty of Limerick, a disputed 
settlement in which the English Government promised much in 
the way of tolerance for Catholics and the like, and failed to 
keep its promises. Limerick is still a cardinal memory in the 
long story of Irish embitterment. Comparatively few English 
people have even heard of this Treaty of Limerick ; in Ireland 
it rankles to this day. 

The eighteenth century was a century of accumulating griev- 
ance. English commercial jealousy put heavy restraints upon 
Irish trade, and the development of a wool industry was de- 
stroyed in the south and west. The Ulster Protestants were 
treated little better than the Catholics in these matters, and 
they were the chief of the rebels. There was more agrarian 
revolt in the north than in the south in the eighteenth century. 

Let us state as clearly as our space permits the parallelisms 
and contrasts of the British and Irish situation at this time. 
There was a parliament in Ireland, but it was a Protestant 
parliament, even more limited and corrupt than the contempo- 



1016 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



rary Britisli Parliament; there was a considerable civilization 
in and about Dublin, and much literary and scientific activity, 
conducted in English and centring upon the Protestant uni- 
versity of Trinity College. This was the Ireland of Swift, 
Goldsmith, Burke, Berkeley, and Boyle. It was essentially a 
part of the English culture. It had nothing distinctively 
Irish about it. The Catholic religion and the Irish language 
were outcast and persecuted things in the darkness at this time. 



The EnaUsh 'Pah.', 

14g4r.... 

ditto ,tane. of 
SUzabeiK & Jaxnas I 
Districts 'phwteiXie. 
caiifccaiaJ & settled by 
English & Scots) time 
o£ rlEzabeth & James I 




IRELAND 



It was from this Ireland of the darkness that the recalci- 
trant Ireland of the twentieth century arose. The Irish Par- 
liament, its fine literature, its science, all its culture, gravitated 
naturally enough to London, because they were inseparably a 
part of that world. The more prosperous landlords went to 
England to live, and had their children educated tbere. This 
meant a steady drain of wealth from Ireland to England in the 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1017 

form of rent, spent or invested out of the country. The in- 
creasing facilities of communication steadily enhanced this 
tendency, depleted Dublin and bled Ireland white. The Act of 
Union (January 1st, 1801) was the natural coalescence of 
two entirely kindred systems, of the Anglo-Irish Parliament 
with the British Parliament, both oligarchic, both politically 
corrupt in the same fashion. There was a vigorous opposition 
to the Union on the part not so much of the outer Irish as of 
Protestants settled in Ireland, and a futile insurrection under 
Robert Emmet in 1803. Dublin, which had been a fine Anglo- 
Irish city in the middle eighteenth century, was gradually de- 
serted by its intellectual and political life, and invaded by the 
outer Irish of Ireland. Its fashionable life became more and 
more official, centering upon the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin 
Castle ; its intellectual life flickered and for a time nearly died. 
But while the Ireland of Swift and Goldsmith was part 
and lot with the England of Pope, Dr. Johnson, and Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, while there has never been and is not now 
any real definable difference except one of geogi-aphy between 
the ''governing class" in Ireland and in Britain, the Irish under- 
world and the English underworld were essentially dissimilar. 
The upward struggle of the English 'democracy" to education, 
to political recognition, was difl^erent in many respects from the 
struggle of the Irish underworld. Britain was producing a 
great industrial population,. Protestant or sceptical ; she had 
agricultural labourers indeed, but no peasants. Ireland, with 
no coal, with a poorer soil and landlords who lived in England, 
had become a land of rent-paying peasants. Their cultivation 
was allowed to degenerate more and more into a gi'owing of 
potatoes and a feeding of pigs. The people married and bred ; 
except for the consumption of whisky when it could be got, and 
a little fighting, family life was their only amusement. Here 
are the appalling consequences. The population of Ireland 

in 1785 was 2,845,932, 

in 1803 was 5,536,594, 

in 1845 was 8,295,061, 
at which date the weary potato gave way under its ever-growing 
burthen and there was a frightful famine. Many died, many 
emigrated, especially to the United States; an outflow of emi- 
gration began that made Ireland for a time a land of old people 
and empty nests. 



1018 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Now because of the Union of the Parliaments, the enfran- 
chisement of the English and Irish populations went on simul- 
taneously. Catholic enfranchisement in England meant Cath- 
olic enfranchisement in Ireland. The British got votes be- 
cause they wanted them ; the Irish commonalty got votes be- 
cause the English did. Ireland was over-represented in the 
Union Parliament, because originally Irish seats had been easier 
for the governing class to manipulate than English ; and so it 
came about that this Irish and Catholic Ireland, which had 
never before had any political instrument at all, and which 
had never sought a political instrument, suddenly found itself 
with the power to thrust a solid body of members into the leg- 
islature of Great Britain. After the general election of 1874, 
the old type of venal Irish member was swept aside, and the 
newly enfranchised ''democracy" of Britain found itself con- 
fronted by a strange and perplexing Irish "democracy," dif- 
ferent in its religion, its traditions, and its needs, telling a tale 
of wrongs of which the common English had never heard, 
clamouring passionately for a separation which they could not 
understand and which impressed them chiefly as being need- 
lessly unfriendly. 

The national egotism of the Irish is intense; their circum- 
stances have made it intense ; they were incapable of considering 
the state of affairs in England ; the new Irish party came into 
the British Parliament to obstruct and disorder English busi- 
ness until Ireland became free, and to make themselves a nui- 
sance to the English. This spirit was only too welcome to the 
oligarchy which still ruled the British Empire; they allied 
themselves with the "loyal" Protestants in the north of Ireland 
— loyal that is to the Imperial Government because of their 
dread of a Catholic predominance in Ireland — and they watched 
and assisted the gradual exasperation of the British common 
people by this indiscriminate hostility of the common people 
of Ireland. 

The story of the relation of Ireland to Britain for the last 
half-century is one that reflects the utmost discredit upon the 
governing class of the British Empire, but it is not one of 
which the English commons need be ashamed. Again and 
again they have given evidences of goodwill. British legisla- 
tion in relation to Ireland for nearly half a century shows a 
series of clumsy attempts on the part of liberal England, made 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1019 

in the face of a strenuous opposition from the Conservative 
Party and the Ulster Irish, to satisfy Irish compkiints and 
get to a footing of fellowship. The name of Parnell, an Irish 
Protestant, stands out as that of the chief leader of the Home 
Sule movement. In 1886 Gladstone, the liberal British prime 
minister, brought political disaster upon himself by introduc- 
ing the first Irish Home Rule Bill, a genuine attempt to give 
over Irish affairs for the first time in history to the Irish peo- 
ple. The bill broke the Liberal Party asunder ; and a coalition 
government, the Unionist Government, replaced that of Mr. 
Gladstone. 

This digression into the history of Ireland now comes up to 
the time of infectious imperialism in Europe. The Unionist 
Government, which ousted Mr. Gladstone, had a predomi- 
nantly Tory element, and was in spirit "imperialist" as no pre- 
vious Bri*;ish Government had been. The British political 
history of the subsequent years is largely a history of the conflict 
of the new imperialism, through which an arrogant "British" 
nationalism sought to override the rest of the empire against 
the temperamental liberalism and reasonableness of the Eng- 
lish, which tended to develop the empire into a confederation 
of free and willing allies. N'aturally the "British" imperial- 
ists wanted a subjugated Irish ; naturally the English Liberals 
wanted a free, participating Irish. In 1892 Gladstone strug- 
gled back to power with a small Home Pule majority; and in 
1893 his second Home Rule Bill passed the Commons, and 
was rejected by the Lords. It was not, however, until 1895 
that an imperialist government took office. The party which 
sustained it was called not Imperialist, but "LTnionist" — an odd 
name when we consider how steadily and strenuously it has 
worked to destroy any possibility of an Empire commonweal. 
These Imperialists remained in power for ten years. We have 
already noted their conquest of South Africa. They were de- 
feated in 1905 in an attempt to establish a tariff wall on the 
Teutonic model. The ensuing Liberal Government then turned 
the conquered South African Dutch into contented fellow- 
subjects by creating the self-governing Dominion of South 
Africa. After which it embarked upon a long-impending strug- 
gle with the persistently imperialist House of Lords. 

This w^as a very fundamental struggle in British affairs. On 
the one hand were the Liberal majority of the people of Great 



1020 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Britain honestly and wisely anxious to put this Irish affair 
upon a new and more hopeful footing, and, if possible, to change 
the animosity of the Irish into friendship; on the other were 
all the factors of this new British Imperialism resolved at any 
cost and in spite of every electoral verdict, legally, if possible, 
but if not, illegally, to maintain their ascendancy over the af- 
fairs of the English, Scotch, and Irish and all the rest of the 
empire alike. It was, under new names, the age-long internal 
struggle of the English community; that same conflict of a 
free and liberal-spirited commonalty against powerful "big 
men" and big adventurers and authoritative persons which we 
have already dealt with in our account of the liberation of 
America. Ireland was merely a battleground as America had 
been. In India, in Ireland, in England, the governing class 
and their associated adventurers were all of one mind ; but the 
Irish people, thanks to their religious difference, bad little 
sense of solidarity with the English. Yet such Irish states- 
men as Eedmond, the leader of the Irish party in the House 
of Commons, transcended this national narrowness for a time, 
and gave a generous response to English good intentions. 
Slowly yet steadily the barrier of the House of Lords was 
broken down, and a third Irish Home Rule Bill was brought 
in by Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, in 1912. Throughout 
1913 and the early part of 1914 this bill was fought and re- 
fought through Parliament. At first it gave Home Rule to all 
Ireland; but an Amending Act, excluding Ulster on certain con- 
ditions, was promised. Thus struggle lasted right up to the 
outbreak of the Great War. The royal assent was given to this 
bill after the actual outbreak of war, and also to a bill suspend- 
ing the coming into force of Irish Home Rule until after the 
end of the war. These bills were put upon the Statute Book. 

But from the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill 
onward, the opposition to it had assumed a violent and extrava- 
gant form. Sir Edward Carson, a Dublin lawyer who had 
become a member of the English Bar, and who had held a legal 
position in the ministry of Mr. Gladstone (before the Home 
Rule split) and in the subsequent imperialist government, was 
the organizer and leader of this resistance to a reconciliation 
of the two peoples. In spite of his Dublin origin, he set up 
to be a leader of the Ulster Protestants ; and he brought to the 
conflict that contempt for law which is all too common a char- 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1021 

acteristic of the successful 'barrister, and those gifts of per- 
sistent, unqualified, and uncompromising hostility which dis- 
tinguish a certain type of Irishman. He was the most ''un- 
English" of men, dark, romantic, and violent; and from the 
opening of the straggle he talked with gTisto of armed resist- 
ance to this freer reunion of the English and Irish which the 
third Home Rule Bill contemplated. A body of volunteers 
had been organized in Ulster in 1911, arms were now smug- 
gled into the country, and Sir Edward Carson and a rising 
lawyer named F, E. Smith, trap}>ed up in semi-military style, 
toured Ulster, inspecting these volunteers and inflaming local 
passion. The arms of these prospective rebels were obtained 
from Gennany, and various utterances of Sir Edward Car- 
son's associates hinted at support from "a great Protestant 
monarch." Contrasted with Ulster, the rest of Ireland was 
at that time a land of order and decency, relying upon its 
great leader Redmond and the good faith of the three British 
peoples. 

Now these threats of civil war from Ireland were not in 
themselves anything very exceptional in the record of that un- 
happy island; what makes them significant in the world's 
history at this time is the vehement support they found among 
the English military and governing classes, and the immunity 
from punishment and restraint of Sir Edward Carson and his 
friends. The virus of reaction which came from the success 
and splendour of German imperialism had spread widely, as we 
have explained^ throughout the prevalent and prosperous classes 
in Great Britain. A generation had grown up forgetful of 
the mighty traditions of their forefathers, and ready to ex- 
change the greatness of English fairness and freedom for 
the tawdriest of imperialisms. A fund of a million pounds was 
raised, chiefly in England, to support the Ulster Rebellion, an 
Ulster Provisional Government was formed, prominent English 
people mingled in the fray and careered about Ulster in auto- 
mobiles, assisting in the gun-running, and there is evidence 
that a number of British ofiicers and generals were prepared 
for a pronunciamento upon South American lines rather than 
obedience to the law. The natural result of all this upper-class 
disorderliness was to alarm the main part of Irehmd, never 
a ready friend to England. That Ireland also began in its 
turn to organize "l^ational Volunteers" and to smuggle arms. 



1022 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

The military authorities showed "themselves much keener in 
the suppi-ession of the Nationalist than of the Ulster gun 
importation, and in July, 1914, an attempt to run gims 
at Howth, near Dublin, led to fighting and bloodshed in the 
Dublin streets. The British Isles were on the verge of civil 
war. 

Such in outline is the story of the imperialist revolutionary 
movement in Great Britain up to the eve of the Great War. 
For revolutionary this movement of Sir Edward Carson and 
his associates was. It was plainly an attempt to set aside par- 
liamentary government and the slow-grown, imperfect liberties 
of the British peoples, and, with the assistance of the army, to 
substitute a more Prussianized type of rule, using the Irish 
conflict as the point of departure. It was the reactionary effort 
of a few score thousand people to arrest the world movement 
towards democratic law and social justice, strictly parallel to 
and closely sympathetic with the new imperialism of the Ger- 
man junkers and rich men. But in one very important re- 
spect British and German imperialism differed. In Germany 
it centred upon the crown ; its noisiest, most conspicuous advo- 
cate was the heir-apparent. In Great Britain the king stood 
aloof. By no single public act did King George V betray the 
slightest approval of the new movement, and the behaviour 
of the Prince of Wales, his son and heir, has been equally 
correct. 

In August, 1914, the storm of the Great War burst upon 
the world. In September, Sir Edward Carson was denouncing 
the placing of the Home Rule Bill upon the Statute Book. 
On the same day, Mr. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish 
majority, the proper representative of Ireland, was calling 
upon the Irish people to take their equal part in the burthen 
and effort of the war. For a time Ireland played her part in 
the war side by side with England faithfully and well, until 
in 1915 the Liberal Government was replaced by a coalition, 
in which, through the moral feebleness of Mr. Asquith, the 
prime minister, this Sir Edward Carson figured as Attorney- 
General (with a salary of £7,000 and fees), to be replaced 
presently by his associate in the LTlster sedition, Sir F. E. 
Smith. 

Grosser insult was never offered to a friendly people. The 
work of reconciliation, begun by Gladstone in 1886, and brought 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1911- 1023 

so near to completion, in 1914, was completely and finally 
wrecked. 

In the spring of 1916 Dublin revolted nnsnccessfuUy against 
this new government. The ringleaders of this insurrection, 
many of them mere boys, were shot with a deliberate and 
clumsy sternness that, in view of the treatment of the Ulster 
rebel leaders, impressed all Ireland as atrociously unjust. A 
traitor. Sir Eoger Casement, who had been knighted for prf>- 
vious services to the empire, was tried and executed, no doubt 
deservedly, but his prosecutor was Sir F. E. Smith of the Ulster 
insurrection, a shocking conjunction. The Dublin revolt had 
had little support in Ireland generally, but thereafter the move- 
ment for an independent republic grew rapidly to great pro- 
portions. Against this strong emotional drive there struggled 
the more moderate ideas of such Irish statesmen as Sir Hor- 
ace Plunkett, who wished to see Ireland become a Dominion, 
a "crowned republic" that is, within the empire, on an equal 
footing with Canada and Australia. 

When in December, 1919, Mr. Lloyd George introduced his 
Home Rule Bill into the Imperial Parliament there were no 
Irish members, except Sir Edward Carson and his followers, 
to receive it. The rest of Ireland was away. It refused to 
begin again that old dreary round of hope and disappointment. 
Let the British and their pet Ulstermen do as they would, 
said the Irish. . . . 



§ 4 

Our studies of modern imperialism in Germany and Britain 
bring out certain forces common to the two countries, and we 
shall find these same forces at work in variable degrees and 
with various modifications in the case of the other great modern 
communities at which we shall now glance. This modern im- 
perialism is not a synthetic world uniting movement like the 
older imperialism ; it is essentially a megalomaniac nationalism, 
a nationalism made* aggressive by prosperity; and always it 
finds its strongest support in the military and official castes, 
and in the enterprising and acquisitive strata of society, in 
new money, that is, and big business ; its chief critics in the 
educated poor, and its chief opponents in the peasantry and the 



1024 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



labour masses. It accepts monarchy where it finds it, but it 
is not necessarily a monarchist movement. It does, however, 
need a foreign office of the traditional type for its full develop- 
ment. Its origin, which we have traced very carefully in this 
book of our history, makes this clear. Modern imperialism is 



^£c BALKAM S'XKZ'ES 



1912-13 

AUSTRIA - HU 







TurJosh. 
acquired hy Sepi 

tjr Greece 



Mw ?iutcfnomnus t 
prwjdp^ofAIiama....i 



tyMoittme^oy 

hy Bulgaria. ^^^^^'-^'^■^ Bulgarian territmy^ V.::.:-: \ 
acquired hy JdzmaziiaiiiiJ 



the natural development of the Great Power system which arose 
with the foreign office method of policy, out of the Machia- 
vellian monarchies after the break-up of Christendom. It will 
only come to an end when the intercourse of nations and peo- 
ples through embassies and foreign offices is replaced by an 
assembly of elected representatives in direct touch with their 
peoples. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1025 

French imperialism during the period of the Anned Peace 
in Europe was naturally of a less contident type than the Ger- 
man. It called itself "nationalism" rather than imperialism, 
and it set itself, by appeals to patriotic pride, to thwart the 
efforts of those socialists and rationalists who sought to get 
into touch with liberal elements in German life. It brooded 
upon the Revanche, the return match with Prussia. But in 
spite of that preoccupation, it set itself to the adventure of 
annexation and exploitation in the Par East and in Africa, 
narrowly escaping a war with Britain upon the Fashoda clash 
(1898), and it never relinquished a dream of acquisitions in 
Syria. Italy, too, caught the imperialist fever ; the blood-letting 
of Adowa cooled her for a time, and then she resumed in 1911 
with a war upon Turkey and the annexation of Tripoli. The 
Italian imperialists exhorted their countrymen to forget Maz- 
zini and remember Julius Caesar ; for were they not the heirs 
of the Koman Empire? Imperialism touched the Balkans; 
little countries not a hundred years from slavery began to 
betray exalted intentions; King Ferdinand of Bulgaria as- 
sumed the title of Tsar, the latest of the pseudo-Csesars, and in 
the shop-windows of Athens the curious student could study 
maps showing the dream of a vast Greek empire in Europe 
and Asia. 

In 1913 the three states of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece 
fell upon Turkey, already weakened by her war with Italy, 
and swept her out of all her European possessions except the 
country between Adrianople and Constantinople ; later in that 
year they quarrelled among themselves over the division of the 
spoils. Rumania joined in the game and helped to crush 
Bulgaria. Turkey recovered Adrianople. The greater im- 
perialisms of Austria, Russia, and Italy watched that conflict 
and one another. . . . 



While all the world to the west of her was changing rapidly, 
Russia throughout the nineteenth century changed very slowly 
indeed. At the end of the nineteenth century, as at its be- 
ginning, she was s^^ll a Grand Monarchy of the later seven- 
teenth-century type standing on a basis of barbarism, she was 



1026 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

still at a stage where court intrigues and imperial favourites^ 
could control her international relations. She had driven a 
great railway across Siberia to find the disasters of the Japa- 
nese war at the end of it ; she was using modern methods 
and modern weapons so far as her undeveloped industrialism 
and her small supply of sufficiently educated people permitted ; 
such writers as Dostoievski had devised a sort of mystical im- 
perialism based on the idea of Holy Russia and her mission, 
coloured by racial illusions and anti-Semitic passion; but, as 
events were to show, this had not sunken very deeply into the 
imagination of the Russian masses. A vague, very simple 
Christianity pervaded the illiterate peasant life, mixed with 
much superstition. It was like the pre-reformation peasant 
life of France or Germany. The Russian moujik was sup- 
posed to worship and revere his Tsar and to love to serve a gen- 
tleman; in 1913 reactionary English writers were still praising 
his simple and nnquestioning loyalty. But, as in the case of 
the western European peasant of the days of the peasant re- 
volts, this reverence for the monarchy was mixed up with the 
idea that the monarch and the nobleman had to be good and 
beneficial, and this simple loyalty could, under sufiicient prov- 
ocation, be turned into the same pitiless intolerance of social 
injustice that burnt the chateaux in the Jacquerie (see Chapter 
XXXIV, § 3) and set up the theocracy in Mlinster (Chapter 
XXXIV, § 3). Once the commons were moved to anger, there 
were no links of understanding in a generally diffused education 
in Russia to mitigate the fury of the outbreak. The upper 
classes were as much beyond the sympathy of the lower as a 
different species of animal. These Russian masses were three 
centuries away from such nationalist imperialism as Germany 
displayed. 

And in another respect Russia differed from modern West- 
ern Europe and paralleled its niedia?val phase, and that was 
in the fact that her universities were the resort of many very 
poor students quite out of touch and out of sympathy with the 
bureaucratic autocracy. Before 1917 the significance of the 
proximity of these two factors of revolution, the fuel of dis- 
content and the match of free ideas, was not recognized in 
European thought, and few people realized that in Russia 
more than in any other country lay the possibilities of a fun- 
damental revolution. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1027 



When we turn from these European Great Powers, with 
their inheritance of foreign offices and national policies, to the 
United States of America, which broke away completely from 
the Great Power System in 1776, we find a most interesting 
contrast in the operation of the forces which produced the 
expansive imperialism of Europe. Eor America as for Europe 
the mechanical revolution had brought all the world within the 
range of a few days' journey. The United States, like the 
Great Powers, had world-wide financial and mercantile inter- 
ests; a gi-eat industrialism had grown up and was in need of 
overseas markets; the same crises of belief that had shaken 
the moral solidarity of Europe had occurred in the American 
world. Her people were as patriotic and spirited as any. Why 
then did not the United States develop armaments and an 
aggressive policy ? Why was not the stars and stripes waving 
over Mexico, and why was there not a new Indian system 
growing up in China under that flag? It was the American 
who had opened up Japan. After doing so, he had let that 
power Europeanize itself and become formidable without a 
protest. That alone was enough to make Machiavelli, the father 
of modern foreign policy, turn in his grave. If a European- 
ized Great Power had been in the place of the United States, 
Great Britain would have had to fortify the Canadian frontier 
from end to end — it is now absolutely unarmed — and to main- 
tain a great arsenal in the St. Lawrence. All the divided 
states of Central and South America would long since have 
been subjugated and placed under the disciplinary control of 
United States officials of the "governing class." There would 
have been a perpetual campaign to Americanize Australia and 
New Zealand, and yet another claimant for a share in tropical 
Africa. 

And by an odd accident America had produced in President 
Eoosevelt (President 1901-1908) a man of an energy as rest- 
less as the German Kaiser's, as eager for large achievements, 
as florid and eloquent, an adventurous man with a turn for 
world politics and an instinct for armaments, the very man, 
we might imagine, to have involved his country in the scram- 
ble for overseas possession. 

There does not appear to be any other explanation of this 



1028 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

general restraint and abstinence on the part of tJie United 
States except in their fundamentally diU'crent institutions and 
traditions. In the first place the United States Government 
has no foreign office and no diplomatic corps of the Euro^.ean 
type, no body of "experts" to maintain the tradition of an ag- 
gressive policy. The president has great powers, but they are 
subject to the control of the senate, which again is responsible 
to the state legislatures and the people. The foreign relations 
of the country are thus under open and public control. Secret 
treaties are impossible under such a system, and foreign pow- 
ers complain of the difficulty and uncertainty of "understand- 
ings" with the United States, a very excellent state of ali'airs. 
The United States is ^ constitutionally incapacitated, therefore, 
from tlie kind of foreign policy that has kept Europe for so 
long constantly on the verge of war. 

And, secondly, there has hitherto existed in the States no 
organization for and no tradition of what one may call non- 
assimilable possessions. Where there is no crown there cannot 
be crown colonies. In spreading across the American conti- 
nent, the United States had developed a quite distinctive 
method of dealing with new territories, admirably adapted for 
unsettled lands, but very inconvenient if applied too freely to 
areas already containing an alien population. This method was 
based on the idea that there cannot be in the United States 
system a permanently subject people. The first stage of the 
ordinary process of assimilation had been the creation of a "ter- 
ritory" under the federal government, having a considerable 
measure of self-government, sending a delegate (who. could not 
vote) to congress, and destined, in the natural course of things, 
as the country became settled and population increased, to 
flower at last into full statehood. This had been the process 
of development of all the latter states of the Union ; the latest 
territories to become states being Arizona and New Mexico 
in 1910. The frozen wilderness of Alaska, bought from Kus- 
sia, remained politically undeveloped simply because it had an 
insufficient population for state organization. As the annexa- 
tions of Germany and Great Britain in the Pacific threatened 
to deprive the United States navy of coaling stations in that 
ocean, a part of the Samoan Islands (1889) and the Sandwich 
Islands (Hawaii) were annexed (1898). Here for the first 
* "Is," not "are." Since the Civil War the U. S. A. is one nation. A. C. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1029 

time the United States had real subject populations to deal 
with. But in the absence of any class comparable to the Anglo- 
Indian officials who sway British opinion, the American pro- 
cedure followed the territorial method. Every effort was made 
to bring the educational standards of Hawaii up to the Ameri- 
can level, and a domestic legislatui^ on the territorial pattern 
was organized so that these dusky islanders ^cem destined ulti- 
mately to obtain full United States citizenship. (The small 
Samoan Islands are taken care of by a United States naval 
administrator.) 

In 1895 occurred a quan-el between the United States and 
Britain upon the subject of Venezuela, and the Monroe Doc- 
trine was upheld stoutly by President Cleveland. Then Mr. 
Olney made this remarkable declaration: "To-day the United 
States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat 
is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." 
This, together with the various Pan-American congi-esses that 
have been held, point to a real open '^foreign policy" of alli- 
ance and mutual help throughout America. Treaties of ar- 
bitration hold good over all that continent, and the future seems 
to point to a gradual development of inter-statc organization, 
a Pax Americana, of the English-speaking and Spanish-speak- 
ing peoples, the former in the role of elder brother. Here is 
something we cannot even call an empire, something going far 
beyond the great alliance of the British Empire in the open 
equality of its constituent parts. 

Consistently with this idea of a common American welfare, 
the United States in 1808 intervened in the affairs of Cuba, 
which had been in a state of chronic insurrection against Spain 
for many years. A brief war ended in the acquisition of Cuba, 
Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. Cuba is now an inde- 
pendent self-governing republic. Porto Rico and the Philip- 
pines have, however, a special sort of government, with a pop- 
ularly elected lower house and an upper body containing mem- 
bers appointed by the United States senate. It is improbable 
thai either Porto Rico or the Philippines will become states in 
the Union. They are much more likely to become free states 
in some comprehensive alliance with both English-speaking and 
Latin America. 

Both Cuba and Porto Rico welcomed the American inter- 
vention in their affairs, but in the Philippine Islands there 



lOSO THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

was a demand for comjjlete and immediate freedom after the 
Spanish war, and a considerable resistance to the American 
military administration. There it was that the United States 
came nearest to imperialism of the Great Power type, and that 
her record is most questionable. There was much sympathy with 
the insurgents in the states. Here is the point of view of ex- 
President Roosevelt as he wrote it in his Autobiography (1913) : 

"As regards the Philippines, my belief was that we should 
train them for self-government as rapidly as possible, and then 
leave them free to decide their own fate. I did not believe in 
setting the time-limit within which we would give them inde- 
pendence, because I did not believe it wise to try to forecast 
how soon they would be fit for self-government ; and once 
having made the promise, I would have felt that it was impera- 
tive to keep it. Within a few months of my assuming office 
we had stamped out the last armed resistance in the Philip- 
pines that was not of merely sporadic character; and as soon 
as peace was secured, we turned our energies to developing 
the islands in the interests of the natives. We established 
schools everywhere; we built roads; we administered an even- 
handed justice ; we did everything possible to encourage agri- 
culture and industry; and in constantly increasing measure 
we employed natives to do their own governing, and finally 
provided a legislative chamber. . . . We are governing, and 
have been governing, the islands in the interests of the Fili- 
pinos themselves. If after due time the Filipinos themselves 
decide that they do not wish to be thus governed, then I trust 
that we will leave ; but when we do leave, it must be distinctly 
understood that we retain no protectorate — and above all that 
we take part in no joint protectorate — over the islands, and give 
them no guarantee, of neutrality or otherwise ; that in short, 
we are absolutely quit of responsibility for them, of every kind 
and description." 

This is an entirely different outlook from that of a British 
or French foreign office or colonial office official. But it is not 
very widely different from the spirit that created the Domin- 
ions of Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and brought 
forward the three FCome Rule Bills for Ireland. It is in the 
older and more characteristic English tradition from which the 
Declaration of Independence derives. It sets aside, without 
discussion, the detestable idea of "subject peoples." 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 lOSl 

Here we will not enter into political complications attendant 
upon the making of the Panama Canal, for they introduce no 
fresh light upon this interesting question of the American 
method in world politics. The history of Panama is American 
history purely. But manifestly just as the internal political 
structure of the Union was a new thing in the world, so, too, 
were its relations with the world heyond its borders. 

§ T 

We have been at some pains to examine the state of mind 
of Europe and of America in regard to international relations 
in the years that led up to the world tragedy of 1914 because, 
as more and more people are coming to recognize, that great 
war or some such war was a necessary consequence of the men- 
tality of the period. All the things that men and nations do 
are the outcome of instinctive motives reacting upon the ideas 
which talk and books and newspapers and schoolmasters and 
so forth have put into people's heads. Physical necessities, 
pestilences, changes of climate, and the like outer things may 
deflect and distort the growth of human history, but its living 
root is thought. 

All human history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Be- 
tween the man of to-day and the Cro-Magnard the physical and 
mental differences are very slight; their essential difference 
lies in the extent and content of the mental background which 
we have acquired in the five or six hundred generations that 
intervene. 

We are too close to the events of the Great War to pretend 
that this Outline can record the verdict of history thereupon, 
but we may hazard the guess that when the passions of the 
conflict have faded, it will be Germany that will be most blamed 
for bringing it about, and she will be blamed not because she 
was morally and intellectually very different from her neigh- 
bours, but because she had the common disease of imperialism 
in its most complete and energetic form. ISTo self-respecting 
historian, however superficial and popular his aims may be, can 
coiintenance the legend, produced by the stresses of the war, 
that the German is a sort of human being more cruel and 
abominable than any other variety of men. All the great states 
of Europe before 1914 were in a condition of aggressive na- 



10S2 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

tionalism and drifting towards war ; the government of Ger- 
many did but lead the general movement. She fell into the 
pit first, and she floundered deepest. She became the dreadful 
example at which all her fellow sinners could cry out. 

For long, Germany and Austria had been plotting an exten- 
sion of German influence eastward through Asia Minor to the 
East. The German idea was crystallized in the phrase "Berlin 
to Bagdad." Antagonized to the German dreams were those 
of Russia, which was scheming for an extension of the Slav 
ascendancy to Constantinople and through Serbia to the Ad- 
riatic. These lines of ambition lay across one another and 
were mutually incompatible. The feverish state of aftairs in 
the Balkans was largely the outcome of the intrigues and propa- 
gandas sustained by the German and Slav schemes. Turkey 
turned for support to Germany, Serbia to Russia. Rumania 
and Italy, both Latin in tradition, both nominally allies of 
Germany, pursued remoter and deeper schemes in common. 
Ferdinand, the Tsar of Bulgaria, was following still darker 
ends ; and the squalid mysteries of the Greek court, whose king 
was the German Kaiser's brother-in-law, are beyond our pres- 
ent powers of inquiry. 

But the tangle did not end with Germany on the one hand 
and Russia on the other. The greed of Germany in 1871 had 
made France her inveterate enemy. The French people, aware 
of their inability to recover their lost provinces by their own 
strength, had conceived exaggerated ideas of the power and 
helpfulness of Russia. The French people had subscribed 
enormously to Russian loans. France was the ally of Russia. 
If the German powers made war upon Russia, France would 
certainly attack them. 

Now the short eastern French frontier was very strongly 
defended. There was little prospect of Germany repeating the 
successes of 1870-71 against that barrier. But the Belgian 
frontier of France was longer and less strongly defended. An 
attack in overwhelming force on France through Belgium 
might repeat 1870 on a larger scale. The French left might 
be swung back south-eastwardly on Verdun as a pivot, and 
crowded back upon its right, as one shuts an open razor. This 
scheme the German strategists had worked out with great care 
and elaboration. Its execution involved an outrage upon the 
law of nations because Prussia had undertaken to guarantee 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1033 

the neutrality of Belgium and had no quarrel with her, and it 
involved the risk of bringing in Great Britain (which power 
was also pledged to protect Belgium) against Germany. Yet 
the Germans believed that their fleet had grown strong enough 
to make Great Britain hesitate to interfere, and with a view 
to possibilities they had constructed a great system of strategic 
railways to the Belgian frontier, and made every preparation 
for the execution of this scheme. So they might hope to strike 
down France at one blow, and deal at their leisure with Russia. 

In 1914 all things seemed moving together in favour of the 
two Central Powers. Russia, it is true, had been recovering 
since 190G, but only very slowly; France was distracted by 
financial scandals. The astounding murder of M. Calmette, 
the editor of the Figaro, by the wife of M. Caillaux, the min- 
ister of finance, brought these to a climax in March; Britain, 
all Germany was assured, was on the verge of a civil war in 
Ireland. Repeated efforts were made both by foreign and Eng- 
lish people to get some definite statement of what Britain 
would do if Germany and Austria assailed France and Russia ; 
but the British Foreign Secretary maintained a front of heavy 
ambiguity up to the very day of the British entry into the war. 
As a consequence, there was a feeling on the continent that 
Britain would either not fight or delay fighting, and this may 
have encouraged Germany to go on threatening France. Events 
were precipitated on June 28th by the assassination of 
the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian 
Empire, when on a state visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bos- 
nia. Here was a timely excuse to set the armies marching. 
"It is now or never," said the German Emperor. Serbia was 
accused of instigating the murderers, and notwithstanding the 
fact that Austrian commissioners reported that there was no 
evidence to implicate the Serbian government, the Austro-Hun- 
garian government contrived to press this grievance towards, 
war. On July 23rd Austria discharged an ultimatum at Serbia, 
and, in spite of a practical submission on the part of Serbia, 
and of the efforts of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign 
Secretary, to call a conference of the powers, declared war 
against Serbia on July 28th. 

Russia mobilized her army on July 30th, and on August 1st 
Germany declared war upon her. German troops crossed into 
French territory next day, and, simultaneously with the deliv- 



10S4 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

ery of an ultimatum to the unfortunate Belgians, the big 
flanking movement through Luxembourg and Belgium began. 
Westward rode the scouts and advance guards. Westward 
rushed a multitude of automobiles packed with soldiers. Enor- 
mous columns of grey-clad infantry followed ; round-eyed, fair 
young Germans they were for the most part — law-abiding, 
educated youngsters who had never yet seen a shot fired in 
anger. "This was war," they were told. They had to be 
bold and ruthless. Some of them did their best to carry out 
these militarist instructions at the expense of the ill-fated 
Belgians. 

A disproportionate fuss has been made over the detailed 
atrocities in Belgium, disproportionate, that is, in relation to the 
fundamental atrocity of August, 1914, which was the invasion 
of Belgium. Given that, the casual shootings and lootings, the 
wanton destruction of property, the plundering of inns and of 
food and drink shops by hungry and weary men, and the con- 
sequent rapes and incendiarism follow naturally enough. Only 
very simple people believe that an army in the field can main- 
tain as high a level of honesty, decency, and justice as a settled 
community at home. And the tradition of the Thirty Years' 
War still influenced the Prussian army. It has been customary 
in the countries allied against Germany to treat all this vileness 
and bloodshed of the Belgian months as though nothing of the 
sort had ever happened before, and as if it were due to some 
distinctively evil strain in the German character. They were 
nicknamed "Huns." But nothing could be less like the sys- 
tematic destructions of these nomads (who once proposed to 
exterminate the entire Chinese population in order to restore 
China to pasture) than the German crimes in Belgium. Much 
of that crime was the drunken brutality of men who for the 
first time in their lives were free to use lethal weapons, much 
of it was the hysterical violence of men shocked at their own 
proceedings and in deadly fear of the revenge of the people 
whose country they had outraged, and much of it was done 
under duress because of the theory that men should be terrible 
in warfare and that populations are best subdued by fear. The 
German common people were bundled from an orderly obedi- 
ence into this war in such a manner that atrocities were bound 
to ensue. They certainly did horrible and disgusting things. 
But any people who had been worked up for war and led into 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1035 



war as the Germans were, would have behaved in a similar 
manner. 

On the night of August 2nd, while most of Europe, still under 
the tranquil inertias of half a century of peace, still in the 
habitual enjoyment of such a widely diffused plenty and 



TVfa p to Ulustmt^ the Orlsixvxi G ER MAK VUxi,igi4^ 

*■ — — I — V^ rr--<jr\-\ T axrm — t- 1 cttt 




JrcTuA-Sritish. line Icforcthe fell 
oflsfamui' ■ 
» » " a fartdaht later 

of tJie Mama} i 



Advance of the Germsn right wing """^ ■— ^^> 
Groiina over 1000 ft. IHiyfUl ovcrSOOOft. 



cheapness and freed(mi as no man living will ever see again, 
was thinking about its summer holidays, the little Belgian 
village of Vise was ablaze, and stupefied rustics were being led 
out and shot because it was alleged someone had fired on the 
invaders. The officers who ordered these acts, the men who 
obeyed, must surely have felt scared at the strangeness of the 
things they did. Most of them had never yet seen a violent 
death. And they had set light not to a village, but a world. 



1036 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

It was the begiiiniDg of the end of an age of comfort, confi- 
dence, and gentle and seemly behaviour in Europe. 

So soon as it was clear that Belgium was to be invaded, 
Great Britain ceased to hesitate, and (at eleven at night on 
August 4th) declared war upon Germany. The following day 
a German mine-laying vessel was caught off the Thames mouth 
by the cruiser Amphion and sunk, — the first time that the 
British and Germans had ever met in conflict under their own 
national flags upon land or water. . . . 

All Europe still remembers the strange atmosphere of those 
eventful sunny August days, the end of the Armed Peace. For 
nearly half a century the Western world had been tranquil 
and had seemed safe. Only a few middle-aged and ageing 
people in France had had any practical experience of warfare. 
The newspapers spoke of a world catastrophe, but that con- 
veyed very little meaning to those for whom the world had 
always seemed secure, who were indeed almost incapable of 
thinking of it as otherwise than secure. In Britain particu- 
larly for some weeks the peace-time routine continued in a 
slightly dazed fashion. It was like a man still walking about the 
world unaware that he has contracted a fatal disease which will 
alter every routine and habit in his life. People went on with 
their summer holidays; shops reassured their customers with 
the announcement ''business as usual.'? There was much talk 
and excitement when the newspapers came, but it was the talk 
and excitement of spectators who have no vivid sense of par- 
ticipation in the catastrophe that was presently to involve 
them all. 



We will now review very briefly the main phases of the world 
struggle which had thus commenced. Planned by Germany, it 
began with a swift attack designed to "knock out" France while 
Russia was still getting her forces together in the East. For 
a time all went well. Military science is never up to date 
under modern conditions, because military men are as a class 
unimaginative, there are always at any date undeveloped in- 
ventions capable of disturbing current tactical and strategic 
practice which the military intelligence has declined. The 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1037 

German plan had been made for some years; it was a stale 
plan ; it could probably have been foiled at the outset by a 
proper use of entrenchments and barbed wire and machine 
guns, but the French were by no means as advanced in their 
military science as the Germans, and they trusted to methods 
of open warfare that were at least fourteen years behind the 
times. They had a proper equipment neither of barbed wire 
nor machine guns, and there was a ridiculous tradition that 
the Frenchman did not fight well behind earthworks. The Bel- 
gian frontier was defended by the fortress of Liege, ten or 
twelve years out of date, with forts whose armament had been 
furnished and fitted in many cases by German contractors ; and 
the French north-eastern frontier was very badly equipped. 
Naturally the German armament firm of Krupp had provided 
nutcrackers for these nuts in the form of exceptionally heavy 
guns firing high explosive shell. These defences proved there- 
fore to be mere traps for their garrisons. The French attacked 
and failed in the southern Ardennes. The German hosts 
swung round the French left with an effect of being irresistible ; 
Liege fell on August 9th, Brussels was reached on August 20th, 
and the small British army of about Y0,000, which had arrived 
in Belgium, was struck at Mons (August 22nd) in overwhelm- 
ing force, and driven backward in spite of the very deadly rifle 
tactics it had learnt during the South African War. The little 
British force was pushed aside westward, and the German 
right swept down so as to leave Paris to the west and crumple 
the entire French army back upon itself. 

So confident was the Gennan higher command at this stage 
of having won the war, that by the end of August German 
troops were already being withdrawn for the Eastern front, 
where the Russians were playing havoc in East and West Prus- 
sia. And then came the French counter-attack, strategically 
a very swift and brilliant counter-attack. The French struck 
back on their centre, they produced an unexpected army on 
their left, and the small British army, shaken but reinforced, 
was still fit to play a worthy part in the counter-stroke. The 
German right overran itself, lost its cohesion, and was driven 
back from the Marne to the Aisne (Battle of the Marne, Sep- 
tember 6th to 10th). It would have been driven back farther 
had it not had the art of entrenchment in reserve. Upon the 
Aisne it stood and dug itself in. The heavy guns, the high 



10S8 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

explosive shell, the tanks, needed by the allies to smash up 
these entrenchments, did not yet exist. 

The Battle of the Marne shattered the original German plan. 
For a time France was saved. But the German was not de- 
feated; he had still a great offensive superiority in men and 
equipment. His fear of the Kussian in the east had been re- 
lieved by a tremendous victory at Tannenberg. His next phase 
was a headlong, less elaborately planned campaign to outflank 
the left of the allied armies and to seize the Channel ports and 
cut off supplies coming from Britain to France. Both armies 
extended to the west in a sort of race to the coast. Then the 
Germans, with a great superiority of guns and equipment, 
struck at the British round and about Ypres. They came 
very near to a break through, but the British held them. 

The war on the Western front settled down to trench war- 
fare. Neither side had the science and equipment needed to 
solve the problem of breaking through modern entrenchments 
and entanglements, and both sides were now compelled to resort 
to scientific men, inventors, and such-like unmilitary persons 
for counsel and help in their difficulty. At that time the essen- 
tial problem of trench warfare had already been solved; there 
existed in England, for instance," the model of a tank, which 
would have given the allies a swift and easy victory before 
1916; but the professional military mind is by necessity an in- 
ferior and unimaginative mind ; no man of high intellectual 
quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling; 
nearly all supremely great soldiers have been either inexperi- 
enced fresh-minded young men like Alexander, Napoleon, and 
Hoche, politicians turned soldiers like Julius Caesar, nomads 
like the Hun and Mongol captains, or amateurs like Crom- 
well and Washington ; whereas this war after fifty years of 
militarism was a hopelessly professional war; from first to 
last it was impossible to get it out of the hands of the regular 
generals, and neither the German nor allied headquarters was 
disposed to regard an invention with toleration that would de- 
stroy their traditional methods. The tank was not only dis- 
agreeably strange to these military gentlemen, but it gave an 
unprofessional protection to the common soldiers within it. The 
Germans, however, did make some innovations. In February 
(28) they produced a rather futile novelty, the flame projector, 
the user of which was in constant danger of being burnt alive, 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1039 



and in April, in the midst of a second great offensive upon the 
British (second Battle of Ypres, April 17th to May 17th), 
they employed a cloud of poison gas. This horrihle device was 
used against Algerian and Canadian troops; it shook them 
by the physical torture it inflicted, and by the angTiish of those 




FRONT 

AL2W ]lxyi . Mirch 1915 _— «_ 
" Aprd 1917 

German Une, , July 1916 •_•_._._. 
AULed Um , Nov. ll'^ igis _^«_^ 



w^ho died, but it failed to break through them. For some 
weeks chemists were of more importance than soldiers on the 
allied front, and within six weeks the defensive troops were 
already in possession of protective methods and devices. 

For a year and a half, until July, 1916, the Western front 
remained in a state of indecisive tension. There were heavy 
attacks on either side that ended in bloody repulses. The 
French made costly but glorious thrusts at Arras and in Cham- 



1040 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

pague in 1915, the British at Loos. From Switzerhind to the 
North Sea there ran two continuous lines of entrenchment, 
sometimes at a distance of a mile or more, sometimes at a dis- 
tance of a few feet (at Arras e.g.), and in and behind these 
lines of trenches millions of men toiled, raided their enemies, 
and prejjared for sanguinary and foredoomed offensives. In 
any preceding age these stagnant masses of men would have 
engendered a pestilence inevitably, but here again modem sci- 
ence had altered the conditions of warfare. Certain novel 
diseases appeared, trench feet for instance, caused by prolonged 
standing in cold water, new forms of dysentery, and the like, 
but none developed to an extent to disable either combatant 
force. Behind this front the whole life of the belligerent na- 
tions was being turned more and more to the task of maintain- 
ing supplies of food, munitions, and, above all, men to supply 
the places of those who day by day were killed or mangled. 
The Germans had had the luck to possess a considerable number 
of big siege guns intended for the frontier fortresses ; these 
were now available for trench smashing with high explosive, 
a use no one had foreseen for them. The Allies throughout 
the first years were markedly inferior in their supply of big 
guns and ammunition, and their losses were steadily gi-eater 
than the German. Mr. Asquith, the British Prime Min- 
ister, though a very fine practitioner in all the arts of Par- 
liament, was wanting in creative ability ; and it is pi-obably 
due to the push and hustle of Mr. Lloyd George (who pres- 
ently ousted him in December, 1916) and the clamour of the 
British press that this inferiority of supplies was eventually 
rectified. 

There was a tremendous German onslaught upon the French 
throughout the first half of 1916 round and about Verdun. 
The Germans suffered enormous losses and were held, after 
pushing in the French lines for some miles. The French losses 
were as great or greater. "lis ne passeront pas," said and sang 
the French infantry — and kept their word. 

The Eastern German front was more extended and less sys- 
tematically entrenched than the Western. For a time the Rus- 
sian armies continued to press westward in spite of the Tan- 
nenberg disaster. They conquered nearly the whole of Galicia 
from the Austrians, took Lemberg on September 2nd, 1914, and 
the great fortress of Przemysl on March 22nd, 1915. But 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1041 

after tlie Germans had failed to break the Western front of 
the Allies, and after an inetfective Allied offensive made with- 
out proper material, they turned to Kussia, and a series of 
heavy blows, with a novel use of massed artillery, were struck 
first in the south and then at the north of the Russian front. 
On June 22nd, Przemysl was retaken, and the whole Russian 
line was driven back until Vilna (September 2nd) was in 
German hands. 

In May, 1915 (23rd), Italy joined the allies, and declared 
war upon Austria. (Not until a year later did she declare 
war on Germany.) She pushed over her eastern boundary 
towards Goritzia (which fell in the summer of 1916), but her 
intei*vention was of little use at that time to either Russia or 
the two Western powers. She merely established another line 
of trench warfare among the high mountains of her picturesque 
north-eastern frontier. 

While the main fronts of the chief combatants were in this 
state of exhaustive deadlock, both sides were attempting to 
strike round behind the front of their adversaries. The Ger- 
mans made a series of Zeppelin, and later of aeroplane raids 
upon Paris and the east of England. Ostensibly these aimed 
at depots, munition works, and the like targets of military 
importance, but practically they bombed promiscuously at in- 
habited places. At first these raiders dropped not very effective 
bombs, but later the size and quality of these missiles increased, 
considerable numbers of people were killed and injured, and 
very much damage was done. The English people were roused 
to a pitch of extreme indignation by these outrages. Although 
the Germans had possessed Zeppelins for some years, no one 
in authority in Great Britain had thought out the proper 
methods of dealing with them, and it was not until late in 
1916 that an adequate supply of anti-aircraft gTins was brought 
into play and that these raiders were systematically attacked 
by aeroplanes. Then came a series of Zeppelin disasters, and 
after the spring of 1917 they ceased to be used for any purpose 
but sea scouting, and their place as raiders was taken by large 
aeroplanes (the Gothas). The visits of these latter machines 
to London and the east of England became systematic after 
the summer of 1917. All through the winter of 1917-18, Lon- 
don on every moonlight night became familiar with the banging 
of warning maroons, the shrill whistles of the police alarm, the 



1042 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

hasty clearance of the streets, the distant nimhling of scores 
and hundreds of anti-aircraft guns growing steadily to a wild 
uproar of thuds and crashes, the swish of tlying shrapnel, and 
at last, if any of the raiders got through the barrage, with the 
dull heavy bang of the bursting bombs. Then presently, amidst 
the diminuendo of the gunfire would come the inimitable rush- 
ing sound of the fire brigade engines and the hurry of the 
ambulances. . . . War was brought home to every Londoner 
by these experiences. 

While the Germans were thus assailing the nerve of their 
enemy home population through the air, they were also attack- 
ing the overseas trade of the British by every means in their 
power. At the outset of the war they had various trade de- 
stroyers scattered over the world, and a squadron of powerful 
modern cruisers in the Pacific, namely, the Scharnhorst, the 
Gneisenau, the Leipzig, the Nilrnberg, and the Dresden. Some 
of the detached cruisers, and particularly the Emden, did a 
considerable amount of commerce destroying before they were 
hunted down, and the main squadron caught an inferior Brit- 
ish force off the coast of Chile and sank the Good Hope and 
the Monmouth on November 1st, 1914. A month later these 
German ships were themselves pounced upon by a British force, 
and all (except the Dresden) sunk by Admiral Sturdee in the 
Battle of the Falkland Isles. After this conflict the allies re- 
mained in undisputed possession of the surface of the sea, a 
supremacy which the gTcat naval Battle of Jutland (May 1st, 
1916) did nothing to shake. The Germans concentrated their 
attention more and more upon submarine warfare. From the 
beginning of the war they had had considerable submarine suc- 
cesses. On one day, September 22nd, 1914, they sank three 
powerful cruisers, the Ahoukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, with 
1,473 men. They continued to levy a toll upon British ship- 
ping throughout the war; at first they hailed and examined 
passenger and mercantile shipping, but this practice they dis- 
continued for fear of traps, and in the spring of 1915 they 
began to smk ships without notice. In May, 1915, they sank 
the great passenger liner, the Lusitania, without any warning, 
drowning a number of American citizens. This embittered 
American feeling against them, but the possibility of injuring 
and perhaps reducing Britain by a submarine blockade was 
so great, that they persisted in a more and more intensified 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1043 

submarine campaign, regardless of the danger of dragging the 
United States into the circle of their enemies. 

Meanwhile, Turkish forces, very ill-equipped, were making 
threatening gestures at Eg)'pt across the desert of Sinai. 

And while the Germans were thus striking at Britain, their 
least accessible and most formidable antagonist, through the 
air and under the sea, the French and British were also em- 
barking upon a disastrous flank attack in the east upon the 
Central Powers through Turkey. The Gallipoli campaign was 
finely imagined, but disgracefully executed. Had it succeeded, 
the Allies would have captured Constantinople in 1915. But 
the Turks were given two months' notice of the project by a 
premature bombardment of the Dardanelles in February, the 
scheme was also probably betrayed through the Greek Court, 
and when at last British and French forces were landed upon 
the Gallipoli peninsula in April, they found the Turks well 
entrenched and better equipped for trench warfare than them- 
selves. The Allies trusted for heavy artillery to the great guns 
of the ships, which were comparatively useless for battering 
down entrenchments, and among every other sort of thing that 
they had failed to foresee, they had not foreseen hostile sub- 
marines. Several great battleships were lost ; they went down in 
the same clear waters over which the ships of Xerxes had once 
sailed to their fate at Salamis. The story of the Gallipoli cam- 
paign from the side of the Allies is at once heroic and pitiful, a 
story of courage and incompetence, and of life, material, and 
prestige wasted, culminating in a withdrawal in January, 1916. 

Linked up closely with the vacillation of Greece was the 
entry of Bulgaria into the war (October 12th, 1915). The 
king of Bulgaria had hesitated for more than a year to make 
any decision between the two sides. Now the manifest failure 
of the British at Gallipoli, coupled with a strong Austro-Ger- 
man attack in Serbia, swung him over to the Central Powers. 
While the Serbs were hotly engaged with the Austro-German 
invaders upon the Danube he attacked Serbia in the rear, and 
in a few weeks the country had been completely overrun. The 
Serbian army made a terrible retreat through the mountains 
of Albania to the coast, where its remains were rescued by 
an Allied fleet. 

An Allied force landed at Salonika in Greece, and pushed 
inland towards Monastir, but was unable to render any effectual 



1044 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

assistance to the Serbians. It was the Salonika plan wiiich 
sealed the fate of the Gallipoli expedition. 

To the east, in Mesopotamia, the British, using Indian 
troops chiefly, made a still remoter flank attack upon the Central 
Powers. An army, very ill provided for the campaign, was 
landed at Basra in the November of 1914, and pushed up to- 
wards Bagdad in the following year. It gained a victory at 
Ctesiphon, the ancient Arsacid and Sassanid capital within 
twenty-five miles of Bagdad, but the Turks were heavily rein- 
forced, there was a retreat to Kut, and there the British army, 
under General Townshend, was surrounded and starved into 
surrender on April 29th, 1916. 

All these campaigns in the air, under the seas, in Russia, 
Turkey, and Asia, were subsidiary to the main front, the front 
of decision, between Switzerland and the sea ; and there the 
main millions lay entrenched, slowly learning the necessary 
methods of modern scientific warfare. There was a rapid prog- 
ress in the use of the aeroplane. At the outset of the war this 
had been used chiefly for scouting, and by the Germans for 
the dropping of marks for the artillery. Such a thing as 
aerial fighting was unheard of. In 1916 the aeroplanes carried 
machine guns and fought in the air; their bombing work was 
increasingly important, they had developed a wonderful art 
of aerial photography, and all the aerial side of artillery work, 
both with aeroplanes and observation balloons, had been enor- 
mously developed. But the military mind was still resisting 
the use of the tank, the obvious weapon for decision in trench 
warfare. 

Many intelligent people outside military circles understood 
this quite clearly. The use of the tank against trenches was an 
altogether obvious expedient. Leonardo da Vinci invented an 
early tank, but what military ''expert" has ever had the wits 
to study Leonardo 'i Soon after the South African War, in 
1903, there were stories in magazines describing imaginary 
battles in which tanks figured, and a complete working model 
of a tank made by Mr. J. A. Corry of Leeds, was shown to the 
British military authorities — who of course rejected it — in 
1911. Tanks had been invented and re-invented before the 
war began. But had the matter rested entirely in the hands 
of the military, there would never have been any use of tanks. 
It was Mr. Winston Churchill, who was at the British Admir- 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1045 

alty in 1915-16, who insisted upon the manufacture of the first 
tanks, and it was in the teeth of the grimmest opposition that 
they were sent to France. To the British navy, and not to the 
army, military science owes the use of these devices. The 
German military authorities were equally set against them. In 
July, 191G, Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, 
began a great offensive which failed to break through the Ger- 
man line. In some places he advanced a few miles ; in others 
he was completely defeated. There was a huge slaughter of 
the new British armies. And he did not use tanks. 

In September, when the season was growing too late for a 
sustained offensive, tanks first appeared in warfare. A few 
were put into action by the British in a not very intelligent fash- 
ion. Their effect upon the German was profound, they pro- 
duced something like a panic, and there can be little doubt that 
had they been used in July in sufficient numbers and handled 
by a general of imagination and energy, they would have ended 
the war there and then. At that time the Allies were in greater 
strength than the Germans upon the Western front. The odds 
were roughly seven to four. Russia, though fast approaching 
exhaustion, was still fighting, Italy was pressing the Austrians 
hard, and Rumania was just entering the war on the side of 
the Allies. But the waste of men in this disastrous July of- 
fensive, and the incompetence of the British military command, 
brought the Allied cause to the very brink of disaster. 

Directly the British failure of July had reassured the 
Germans, they turned on the Rumanians, and the winter of 
1916 saw the same fate overtake Rumania that had fallen upon 
Serbia in 1915. The year that had begun with the retreat 
from Gallipoli and the surrender of Kut, ended with the crush- 
ing of Rumania and with volleys fired at a landing party of 
French and British marines by a royalist crowd in the port of 
Athens. It looked as though King Constantine of Greece meant 
to lead his people in the footsteps of King Ferdinand of Bul- 
garia. But the coast-line of Greece is one much exposed to 
naval action. Gi;eece was blockaded, and a French force from 
Salonika joined hands with an Italian force from Valona to 
cut the king of Greece off from his Central European friends. 

(In July, 1917, Constantine was forced to abdicate by the 
Allies, and his son Alexander was 'made king in his place.) 

On the whole, things looked much less dangerous for the 



1046 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Holienzollern imperialism at the end of 1916 than they had done 
after the failure of the first great rush at the Marne. The 
Allies had wasted two years of opportunity. Belgium, Serbia, 
and Eumania, and large areas of France and Russia, were 
occupied by Austro-German troops. Counterstroke after coun- 
terstroke had failed, and Russia was now tottering towards a 
collapse. Had Germany been ruled with any wisdom, she 
might have made a reasonable peace at this time. But the 
touch of success had intoxicated her imperialists. They wanted 
not safety, but triumph, not world welfare, but world empire. 
■^'World power or downfall" was their formula ; it gave their 
antagonists no alternative but a fight to a conclusive end. 

§ 9 

Early in 1917 Russia collapsed. 

By this time the enormous strain of the war was telling 
hardly upon all the European populations. There had been 
a great disorganization of transport everywhere, a discontinu- 
ance of the normal repairs and replacements of shipping, rail- 
ways, and the like, a iising-np of material of all sorts, a 
dwindling of food production, a withdrawal of greater and 
greater masses of men from industry, a cessation of educa- 
tional work, and a steady diminution of the ordinary securi- 
ties and honesties of life. I^owhere was the available direc- 
tive ability capable of keeping a grip upon affairs in the face 
of the rupture of habitual bonds and the replacement of the 
subtle disciplines of peace by the clumsy brutalities of military 
'^order." More and more of the European population was being 
transferred from surroundings and conditions to which it was 
accustomed, to novel circumstances which distressed, stimulated, 
and demoralized it. But Russia suffered first aod most from 
this universal pulling up of civilization from its roots. The 
Russian autocracy was dishonest and incompetent. The Tsar, 
like several of his ancestors, had now given way to a crazy 
pietism, and the court was dominated by a religious impostor, 
Rasputin, whose cult was one of unspeakable foulness, a reek- 
ing scandal in the face of the world. Beneath the rule of this 
dirty mysticism, indolence and scoundrelism mismanaged the 
war. The Russian common soldiers were sent into battle with- 
out guns to support them, without even rifle ammunition; they 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1047 

were wasted by tlieir officers and generals in a delirinm of 
militarist entluisiasm. For a time they seemed to be suffering 
mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a limit to the endur- 
ance even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust for the 
Tsardom was creeping through these armies of betrayed and 
wasted men. From the close of 1915 onwards Russia was a 
source of deepening anxiety to her Western allies. Through- 
out 1916 she remained largely on the defensive, and there 
were rumours of a separate peace with Germany. She gave 
little help to Rumania. 

On December 29th, 191G, the monk Rasputin was mur- 
dered at a dinner-party in Petrograd, and a belated attempt 
was made to put the Tsardom in order. By March things were 
moving rapidly ; food riots in Petrograd developed into a revo- 
lutionary insurrection ; there was an attempted suppression of 
the Duma, the representative body, attempted arrests of lib- 
eral leaders, the formation of a provisional government under 
Prince Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. 
For a time it seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution 
might be possible — perhaps under a new Tsar. Then it be- 
came evident that the destruction of confidence in Russia had 
gone too far for any such adjustments. The Russian people 
were sick to death of the old order of things in Europe, of 
Tsars and of wars and great powers ; it wanted relief, and that 
speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies had no un- 
derstanding of Russian realities; their diplomatists were igno- 
rant of Russian, genteel persons, with their attention directed 
to the Russian Court rather than Russia, they blundered stead- 
ily with the new situation. There was little goodwill among 
the diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest disposition 
to embarrass the new government as much as possible. At 
the head of the Russian republican government was an eloquent 
and picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed 
by the deep forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, 
the "social revolution," at home and cold-shouldered by the 
Allied governments abroad. His allies would neither let him 
give the Russian people land nor peace beyond their frontiers. 
The French and the British press pestered their exhausted ally 
for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans made 
a strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Ad- 
miralty quailed before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in 



1048 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

relief. The new Russian republic had to fight unsupported. 
In spite of their great naval predominance and the bitter pro- 
tests of the great English admiral, Lord Fisher (1841-1920), 
it is to be noted that the Allies, except for some submarine at- 
tacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic 
throughout the war. 

The Russian masses were resolute to end the war. There 
had come into existence in Petrograd a body representing the 
workers and common soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clam- 
oured for an international conference of socialists at Stock- 
holm. Food riots were occurring in Berlin at this time, war 
weariness in Austria and Germany was profound, and there 
can be little doubt, in the light of subsequent events, that such 
a conference would have precipitated a reasonable peace on 
democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution. Kerensky 
implored his Western allies to allow this conference to take 
place, but, fearful of a world-wide outbreak of socialism and 
republicanism, they refused, in spite of the favourable re- 
sponse of a small majority of the British Labour Party. With- 
out either moral or physical help from the Allies, the "moderate" 
Russian republic still fought on and made a last desperate 
offensive effort in July. It failed after some preliminary suc- 
cesses and another great slaughtering of Russians. 

The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies 
broke out in the Russian armies, and particularly upon the 
northern front, and upon November 7th, 1917, Kerensky's 
government was overthrown and power was seized by the Soviet 
Government, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists under Lenin, 
and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western powers, 
Russia passed definitely "out of the war." 

In the spring of 1917 there had been a costly and ineffec- 
tive French attack upon the Champagne front which had failed 
to break through and sustained enormous losses. Here, then, 
by the end of 1917, was a phase of events altogether favourable 
to Germany, had her government been fighting for security 
and well-being rather than for pride and victory. But to the 
very end, to the pitch of final exhaustion, the people of the Cen- 
tral Powers were held to the effort to realize an impossible 
world imperialism. 

To that end it was necessary that Britain should be not 
merely resisted, but subjugated, and in order to do that Ger- 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1049 

many had already dragged America into the circle of her ene- 
mies. Throughout 1916 the sid^marine campaign had been 
gi'owing in intensity, but hitherto it had respected neutral ship- 
ping. In January, 1917, a completer ''blockade" of Great 
Britain and France was proclaimed, and all neutral powers 
were warned to withdraw their shipping from the British 
seas. An indiscriminate sinking of the world's shipping began 
which compelled the United States to enter the war in April 
(6th) 1917. Throughout 1917, while Russia was breaking up 
and becoming impotent, the American people were changing 
swiftly and steadily into a great military nation. And the 
unrestricted submarine campaign for which the German im- 
perialists had accepted the risk of this fresh antagonist, was 
far less successful than had been hoped. The British navy 
proved itself much more inventive and resourceful than the 
British army; there was a rapid development of anti-submarine 
devices under water, upon the surface, and in the air ; and 
after a month or so of serious destruction, the tale of sub- 
marine sinkings declined. The British found it necessary to 
put themselves upon food rations; but the regulations were 
w^ell framed and ably administered, the public showed an ex- 
cellent spirit and intelligence, and the danger of famine and 
social disorder was kept at arm's length. 

Yet the German imperial government persisted in its course. 
If the submarine was not doing all that had been expected, 
and if the armies of America gathered like a thunder-cloud, 
yet Russia was definitely down ; and in October the same sort 
of autumn offensive that had overthrown Serbia in 1915 and 
Rumania in 1916 was now turned with crushing effect against 
Italy. The Italian front collapsed after the Battle of Capo- 
retto, and the Austro-German armies poured down into Venetia 
and came almost within gunfire of Venice. Germany felt justi- 
fied, therefore, in taking a high line with the Russian peace pro- 
posals, and the peace of Brest Litovsk (March 2nd, 1918) gave 
the Western allies some intimation of what a German victory 
would mean to them. It was a crushing and exorbitant peace, 
dictated with the utmost arrogance of confident victors. 

All through the winter German troops had been shifting 
from the Eastern to the Western front, and now, in the spring 
of 1918, the jaded enthusiasm of hungry, weary, and bleeding 
Germany was lashed up for the one supreme effort that was 



1050 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

really and truly to end the war. For some months American 
troops had been in France, but the bulk of the American army 
was still across the Atlantic. It was high time for the final 
conclusive blow upon the Western front, if such a blow was 
ever to be delivered. The first attack was upon the British 
in the Somme region. The not very brilliant cavalry generals 
who were still in command of a front upon which cavalry was 
a useless encumbrance were caught napping; and on March 
21st, in '^Gough's Disaster," the fifth British army was driven 
back in disorder. The jealousies of the British and French 
generals had prevented any unified command of the Allied 
annies in France, and there was no general reserve whatever 
behind Gough. Thousands of guns were lost, and scores of 
thousands of prisoners. Many of these losses were due to the 
utter incompetence of the higher command. No less than a 
hundred tanks were abandoned because they ran out of petrol! 
The British were driven back almost to Amiens. Through- 
out April and May the Germans rained offensives on the Allied 
front. They came near to a break through in the north, and 
they made a great drive back to the Marue, which they reached 
agani on May 30th, 1918. 

This was the climax of the German effort. Behind it was 
nothing but an exhausted homeland. The Allied politicians 
intervened in the quarrels of their professional soldiers, and 
Marshal Foch was put in supreme command of all the Allied 
armies. Fresh troops were hurrying from Britain across the 
Channel, and America was now pouring men into France by 
the hundred thousand. In June the weary Austrians made a 
last effort in Italy, and collapsed before an Italian covmter- 
attack. Early in June Foch began to develop a counter-attack 
in the Marne angle. By July the tide was turning, and the 
Germans were reeling back. The Battle of Chateau Thierry 
(July 18th) proved the quality of the new American armies. 
In August the British opened a great and successful thrust 
into Belgium, and the bulge of the German lines towards 
Amiens wilted and collapsed. Germany had finished. The 
fighting spirit passed out of her army, and October was a story 
of defeat and retreat along the entire Western front. Early 
in November British troops were in Valenciennes and Ameri- 
cans in Sedan. In Italy also the Austrian armies were in a 
state of disorderly retreat. But everywhere now the Hohen- 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1051 

zollem and Ilabsbiirg forces were collapsing. The smash at 
the end was amazingly swift. Frenchmen and Englishmen could 
not believe their newspapers as day after day they announced 
the capture of more hundreds of guns and more thousands of 
prisoners. 

In September a great allied offensive against Bulgaria had 
produced a revolution in that country and peace proposals. 
Turkey had followed with a capitulation at the end of October, 
and Austro-Hungary on November 4th. There was an atterapt 
to bring out the German Fleet for a last fight, but the sailors 
mutinied (November 7th). 

The Kaiser and the Crown Prince bolted hastily, and with- 
out a scrap of dignity, into Holland. On November 11th an 
armistice was signed and the war was at an end. . . . 

For four years and a quarter the war had lasted, and grad- 
ually it had drawn nearly everyone in the Western world, at 
least, into its vortex. Upwards of ten millions of people had 
been actually killed through the fighting, another twenty or 
twenty-five million had died through the hardships and dis- 
orders entailed. Scores of millions were suffering and en- 
feebled by under-nourishment and misery. A vast proportion 
of the living were now engaged in war work, in drilling and 
armament, in making munitions, in hospitals, in working as 
substitutes for men who had gone into the armies and the like. 
Business men had been adapting themselves to the more hectic 
methods necessary for profit in a world in a state of crisis. The 
war had become, indeed, an atmosphere, a habit of life, a new 
social order. Then suddenly it ended. 

In London the armistice was proclaimed about midday on 
November 11th. It produced a strange cessation of every 
ordinary routine. Clerks poured out of their offices and would 
not return, assistants deserted their shops, omnibus drivers and 
the drivers of military lorries set out upon journeys of their 
own devising with picked-up loads of astounded and cheering 
passengers going nowhere in particular and careless whither 
they went. Vast vacant crowds presently choked the streets, 
and every house and shop that possessed such adornments hung 
out flags. • When night came, many of the main streets, which 
had been kept in darkness for many months because of the 
air raids, were brightly lit. It was very strange to see throng- 
ing multitudes assembled in an artificial light again. Every- 



1052 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



^^^SHAS- 



Nov. 1 German \ActDiy m S. 
Dec.8 Jaai?'rfWiaANt) Ifl 



Way7 Ti^ Zuyi^niA jtxtJc 



May 31-£aaZc o{ JUTLAND 



Jan.31 Go'mszi'ppcxhtimi^m.of 



1914- 



1915 



I9I6 



1917 



BRITAIN TTLAKCE- GERt^AKT 



*^Sqt.6M0- HATTIE of d^TitAKNE 

^^ G /aU fcjizk to fAi- AuTU 
,y'^ ^ Oct.9 Antwerp ta 

! i 

Tcb.2fl Gsrm^Tis first use fhnxa-thraw^irs 
^P^l SccOTii Bifi^ of YPRE5 C 



July-Gvwn /Vul::^ '5 ofifeisiir in Argorma 



Zeppelin 

disasters 



Battles af^ 
VERTUN 

VJuly^SOlvfoCE 
Sept 3inis-iire(used 



■Njv.2 last .ship 5unJfb>^.sub.- 
w 7 GcpmaTi Waral nuituiy 



.Va.6 H^.]^ 



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ipi8 






**Huu3«nbnrg'"Zm£ 



.June-First \^v* I ui Champagiui 

Arien^an troops . ^ "^f *■ '^ . 



ui 



of CaxtOjrsa- 



J Jaix.31-?iryf Ammtraju / 

fi ^ . .^rMarcK^ Ijvughh disinter >f^l, 

\J ^}A2!.y50 G^nnaii^ readi ?aame 



Oct. Oilman rtJT-cafbecOTTifijgeiifiral 
>fcv.2 fttSsJi mV^limciSmws 
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(Caporutto): Austri^ns 

thj'eatenVcmc^ 



AOSTRLW 
TTeoORS 

'^RUSSIA 



Oct.29 Julian advanm 
l<fav.4 Austria czpitxhiss 



one felt aimless, with a kind of strained and aching relief. 
It was over at last. There would be no more killing in France, 
no more air raids — and (things wolnld get better. People 
wanted to laugh, and weep — and could do neither. Youths of 
spirit and young soldiers on leave formed thin noisy proces- 
sions that shoved their way through the general drift, and did 
their best to make a jollification, A captured German gun 
was hauled from the Mall, where a vast array of such trophies 
had been set out, into Trafalgar Square, and its carriage burnt. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1053 



3/Cau 



lain-EASTEKH 
FRONT HUSSIA' SERBIA TURK'EY 



Aug. 2 ioissia uu-ati^^LJcrrruuTy' '» " 

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OctSJ-Lodz 



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Md\.22 Russiajis taic Frzetmjsl 
June-PrMm\pl SefJicit 



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Nov.7 TTu: BOWHrVTJC fevA:&n 
Dec.l5 ArmbOu of BRBST-lirovSK 



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Successful 
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Austrian 
attacks 



Sept.IB- Gnat Aujb'o 
Ocrman aitick b^i^-^u 



•Mf.fOPOTfl>{ZA 



Sq*.27fii 

GtniuuiS.V 
Africa 



PeOShmibim 
DahJancUcs 

.^?b.-U(i.'.( 



Sa-hi^ campktcb,' 
crushed l^ivTi3i. 



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Aug.27 dcchj-cs war 

Ams^to - Gcrmajis 

aiui Macfc^n-sen 

crush. 

Rumania 



I 
I 

Nov.22eI^<rf' 

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"26AUppo 



Squibs and crackers were thrown about. But there was little 
concerted rejoicing. Nearly everyone had lost too much and 
suffered too much to rejoice with any fervour. 



§ 10 

The world in the year after the great war was like a man who 
has had some vital surgical operation very roughly performed, 
and who is not yet sure whether he can now go on living or 



1054 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

whether he has not been so profoundly shocked and injured 
that he will presently fall down and die. It was a world dazed 
and stunned. German militarist imperialism had been de- 
feated, but at an overwhelming cost. It had come very near 
to victory. Everything went on, now that the strain of the 
conflict had ceased, rather laxly, rather weakly, and with a 
gusty and uncertain temper. There was a universal hunger 
for peace, a universal desire for the lost safety and liberty and 
prosperity of pre-war times, without any power of will to 
achieve and secure these things. 

Just as with the Roman Eepublic under the long strain 
of the Punic War, so now there had been a great release of 
violence and cruelty, and a profound deterioration in financial 
and economic morality. Generous spirits had sacrificed them- 
selves freely to the urgent demands of the war, but the sly and 
base of the worlds of business and money had watched the 
convulsive opportunities of the time and secured a firm grip 
upon the resources and political power of their countries. 
Everywhere men who would have been regarded as shady ad- 
venturers before 1914 had acquired power and influence while 
better men toiled unprofltably. Such men as Lord Ehondda, 
the British food controller, killed themselves with hard work, 
while the war profiteer waxed rich and secured his grip upon 
press and party organization. 

In the course of the war there had been extraordinary ex- 
periments in collective management in nearly all the belligerent 
countries. It was realized that the common expedients of peace- 
time commerce, the higgling of the market, the holding out for 
a favourable bargain, were incompatible with the swift needs 
of warfare. Transport, fuel, food supply, and the distribution 
of the raw materials not only of clothing, housing, and the 
like, but of everything needed for war munitions, had been 
brought under public control. No longer had farmers been 
allowed to under-farm; cattle had been put upon deer-parks 
and grasslands ploughed up, with or without the owner's ap- 
proval. Luxury building and speculative company promotion 
had been restrained. In effect, a sort of emergency socialist 
state had been established throughout belligerent Europe. It 
was rough-and-ready and wasteful, but it was more effective than 
the tangled incessant profit-seeking, the cornering and fore- 
stalling and incoherent productiveness of "private enterpi-ise." 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 losr, 

In the earlier years of the war there was a very widespread 
feeling of brotherhood and the common interest in all the 
belligerent states. The common men were everywhere sacrific- 
ing life and health for what they believed to be the common 
good of the state. In retnrn, it was promised, there would 
be less social injustice after the war, a more universal devotion 
to the common welfare. In Great Britain, for instance, Mr. 
Lloyd George was particularly insistent upon his intention to 
make the after-war Britain "a land fit for heroes." He fore- 
shadowed the continuation of this new war communism into 
the peace period in discourses of great fire and beauty. In 
Great Britain, there was created a Ministry of Reconstruction, 
which was understood to be planning a new and more generous 
social order, better labour conditions, better housing, extended 
education, a complete and scientific revision of the economic 
system. Similar hopes of a better world sustained the com- 
mon soldiers of France and Germany and Italy. It was pre- 
mature disillusionment that caused the Russian collapse. So 
that two mutually dangerous streams of anticipation were run- 
ning through the minds of men in Western Europe towards 
the end of the war. The rich and adventurous men, and par- 
ticularly the new war profiteers, were making their plans to 
prevent such developments as that air transport should become 
a state property, and to snatch back manufactures, shipping, 
land transport, the public services generally, and the trade in 
staples from the hands of the commonweal into the grip of 
private profit ; they were securing possession of newspapers and 
busying themselves with party caucuses and the like to that 
end ; while the masses of common men were looking forward 
naively to a new state of society planned almost entirely in 
their interest and according to generous general ideas. The 
history of 1919 is largely the clash of these two streams of an- 
ticipation. There was a hasty selling off, by the "business" gov- 
ernment in control, of every remunerative public enterprise to 
private speculators. . . . By the middle of 1919 the labour 
masses throughout the world were manifestly disappointed and 
in a thoroughly bad temper. The British "Minister of Recon- 
struction" and its foreign equivalents were exposed as a soothing 
sham. The common man felt he had been cheated. There was 
to be no reconstruction, but only a restoration of the old order — 
in the harsher form necessitated by the poverty of the new time. 



1056 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

For four years the drama of the war had obscured the social 
question which had been developing in the Western civilizations 
throughout the nineteenth century. Now that the war was over, 
this question reappeared gaunt and bare, as it had never been 
seen before. 

And the irritations and hardships and the general insecurity 
of the new time were exacerbated by a profound disturbance of 
currency and credit. Money, a complicated growth of conven- 
tions rather than a system of values, had been deprived within 
the belligerent countries of the support of a gold standard. 
Gold had been retained only for international trade, and every 
government had produced excessive quantities of paper money 
for domestic use. With the breaking down of the war-time 
barriers the international exchange became a wildly fluctuating 
confusion, a source of distress to everyone except a few gamblers 
and wily speculators. Prices rose and rose — with an infuriating 
effect upon the wage-earner. On the one hand was the employer 
resisting his demands for more pay; on the other hand, food, 
house-room, and clothing were being steadily cornered against 
him. And, which was the essential danger of the situation, he 
had lost any confidence he had ever possessed that any patience 
or industrial willingness he displayed would really alleviate the 
shortages and inconveniences by ivhich he suffered. 

In the speeches of politicians towards the close of 1919 and 
the spring of 1920, there was manifest an increasing recognition 
of the fact that what is called the capitalist system — the private 
ownership system that is, in which private profit is the working 
incentive — was on its trial. It had to produce general prosperity, 
they admitted, or it had to be revised. It is interesting to note 
such a speech as that of Mr. Lloyd George, the British premier, 
delivered on Saturday, December 6th, 1919. Mr. Lloyd George 
had had the education and training of a Welsh solicitor; he 
entered politics early, and in the course of a brilliant parlia- 
mentary career he had had few later opportunities for reading 
and thought. But being a man of great natural shrewdness, he 
was expressing here very accurately the ideas of the more in- 
telligent of the business men and wealthy men and ordinary 
citizens who supported him. 

''There is a new challenge to civilization," he said. "What is 
it? It is fundamental. It affects the whole fabric of society as 
we know it; its commerce, its trade, its industry, its finance, 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1057 

its social order — all are involved in it. There are those who 
maintain that the prosperity and strength of the country have 
been built up by the stimulating and invigorating appeal to in- 
dividual impulse, to individual action. That is one view. The 
State must educate ; the State must assist where necessary ; the 
State must control where necessary ; the State must shield the 
weak against the arrogance of the strong; but the life springs 
from individual impulse and energy. (Cheers.) That is one 
view. What is the other ? That private enterprise is a failure, 
tried, and found wanting — a complete failure, a cruel failure. 
It must be rooted out, and the connnunity must take charge as 
a community, to produce, to distribute, as well as to control. 

''Those are great challenges for u& to decide. We say that 
the ills of private enterprise can be averted. They say, 'No, 
they cannot. No ameliorative, no palliative, no restrictive, no 
remedial measure will avail. These evils are inherent in the 
system. They are the fruit of the tree, and you must cut it 
down.' That is the challenge we hear ringing through the 
civilized world to-day, from ocean to ocean, through valley and 
plain. You hear it in the whining and maniacal shrieking of 
the Bolshevists. You hear it in the loud, clear, but more re- 
strained tones of Congresses and Conferences. The Bolshevists 
would blow up the fabric with high explosive, with horror. 
Others would pull down with the crowbars and with cranks — 
especially cranks. (Laughter.) 

"Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks 
and thirsts for employment, who begs for labour and cannot get 
it, and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for 
by the starvation of his children — that torture is something that 
private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake. (Cheers.) 
Sweating, slums, the sense of semi-slavery in labour, must go. 
We must cultivate a sense of manhood by treating men as men. 
If I — and I say this deliberately — if I had to choose between 
this fabric I believe in, and allowing millions of men and women 
and children to rot in its cellars, I would not hesitate one hour. 
That is not the choice. Thank God it is not the choice. Pri- 
vate enterprise can produce more, so that all men get a fair 
share of it. . . ." ^ 

Here, put into quasi-eloquent phrasing, and with a jest 
adapted to the mental habits of the audience, we have the com- 
^The Times, December 8th, 1919. 



1058 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

mou-sense view of the ordinary prosperous man not only of 
Great Britain, but of America or France or Italy or Gennany. 
In quality and tone it is a fair sample of British political 
thought in 1919. The prevailing economic system has made 
us what we are, is the underlying idea ; and we do not want 
any process of social destruction to precede a renascence of 
society, we do not want to experiment with the fundamentals of 
our social order. Let us accept that. Adaptation, Mr. Lloyd 
George admitted, there had to be. Now this occasion of his 
speaking was a year and a month after the Armistice, and for 
all that period private enterprise had been failing to do all 
that Mr. Lloyd George was so cheerfully promising it would do. 
The community was in urgent need of houses. Throughout the 
war there had been a cessation not only of building, but of 
repairs. The shortage of houses in the last months of 1919 
amounted to scores of thousands in Britain alone.^ Multitudes 
of people were living in a state of exasperating congestion, and 
the most shameless profiteering in apartments and houses was 
going on. It was a difficult, but not an impossible situation. 
Given the same enthusiasm and energy and self-sacrifice that 
had tided over the monstrous crisis of 1916, the far easier task 
of providing a million houses could have been perfonned in a 
year or so. But there had been corners in building materials, 
transport was in a disordered state, and it did not pay private 
enterprise to build houses at any rents within the means of the 
people who needed them. Private enterprise, therefore, so far 
from bothering about the public need of housing, did nothing 
but comer and speculate in rents and sub-letting. It now de- 
manded grants in aid from the State — in order to build at a 
profit. And there was a great crowding and dislocation of 
goods at the depots because there was insufficient road trans- 
port. There was an urgent want of cheap automobiles to move 
about goods and workers. But private enterprise in the auto- 
mobile industry found it far more profitable to produce splendid 
and costly cars for those whom the war had made rich. The 
munition factories built with public money could have been 
converted very readily into factories for the mass production 
of cheap automobiles, but private enterprise had insisted upon 
these factories being sold by the State, and would neither meet 
the public need itself nor let the State do so. So, too, with the 
* Authorities vary between 250,000 and a million houses. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1059 

world in the direst discomfort for need of shipping, private 
enterprise insisted upon the shutting down of tlie newly con- 
structed State shipyards. Currency was dislocated everywhere, 
but private enterprise was busy buying and selling francs or 
marks and intensifying the trouble. While Mr. George was 
making the very characteristic speech we have quoted, the dis- 
content of the common man was gathering everywhere, and little 
or nothing was being done to satisfy his needs. It was becoming 
very evident that unless there was to be some profound change 
in the spirit of business, under an unrestrained private enter- 
prise system there was little or no hope, in Europe at any rate, 
of decent housing, clothing, or education for the workers for 
two or three generations. 

These are facts that the historian of mankind is obliged to 
note with as little comment as possible. Private enterprise in 
Europe in 1919 and 1920 displayed neither will nor capacity 
for meeting the crying needs of the time. So soon as it was 
released from control, it ran naturally into speculation, corner- 
ing, and luxury production. It followed the line of maximum 
profit. It displayed no sense of its own dangers ; and it resisted 
any attempt to restrain and moderate its profits and make itself 
serviceable, even in its own interest. And this went on in 
the face of the most striking manifestations of the extreme re- 
calcitrance on the part of the European masses to the prolonged 
continuance of the privations and inconveniences they suffered. 
In 1913 these masses were living as they had lived since birth; 
they were habituated to the life they led. The masses of 1919, 
on the other hand, had been uprooted everywhere, to go into 
the armies, to go into munition factories, and so on. They 
had lost their habits of acquiescence, and they were hardier and 
more capable of desperate action. Great multitudes of men 
had gone through such brutalizing training as, for instance, 
bayonet drill ; they had learnt to be ferocious, and to think less 
either of killing or being killed. Social unrest had become, 
therefore, much more dangerous. Everything seemed to point 
to a refusal to tolerate the current state of aft'airs for many 
years. ITnless the educated and prosperous and comfortable 
people of Europe could speedily get their private enterprise 
under sufficient restraint to make it work well and rapidly for 
the common good, unless they could develop the idea of business 
as primarily a form of public service and not primarily a method 



1060 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

of profit-making, unless they could in their own interest achieve a 
security of peace that would admit of a cessatioti not only of war 
preparation, but of international commercial warfare, strike and 
insurrection promised to follow strike and insurrection up to a 
complete social and political collapse. It was not that the masses 
had or imagined that they had the plan of a new social, political, 
and* economic system. They had not, and they did not believe 
they had. The defects we have pointed out in the socialist scheme 
(Chapter XXXVIII, § 5) were no secret from them. It was a 
much more dangerous state of affairs than that. It was that they 
were becoming so disgusted with the current system, with its 
silly luxury, its universal waste, and its general misery, that they 
did not care what happened afterward so long as they could 
destroy it. It was a return to a state of mind comparable to that 
which had rendered possible the debacle of the Roman Empire. 

Already in 1919 the world had seen one great community 
go that way, the liussian people. The Russians overturned the 
old order and submitted to the autocratic rule of a small group 
of doctrinaire Bolshevik socialists, because these men seemed to 
have something new to try. They wrecked the old system, and 
at anycost they would not have it back. The information avail- 
able from Russia at the time of writing this summary is still 
too conflicting and too obviously tainted by propagandist aims 
for us to forai any judgment upon the proceedings and methods 
of the Soviet Government, but it is very plain that from No- 
vember, 1917, Russia has not only endured that government 
and its mainly socialistic methods, but has fought for it success- 
fully against anything that seemed to threaten a return to the 
old regime. 

We have already (§5) pointed out the very broad differences 
between the Russian and the Western communities, and the 
strong reasons there are for doubting that they will move upon 
parallel lines and act in similar ways. The Russian peasants 
were cut off by want of education and sympathy from the small 
civilized community of prosperous and educated people which 
lived upon them. These latter were a little separate nation. 
The peasants below, under the really quite alien incitement of 
the Bolshevik socialists, have thrown that separate nation off 
and destroyed it. In the towns, and in the towns alone, com- 
munism rules (1920) ; the rest of Russia is now no more than 
a wilderness of barbaric peasantry. But there is much more 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1061 

unity of thought and feeling- between class and class in the 
West than in Ivuasia, and particularly in the Atlantic commu- 
nities. Even if they wrangle, classes can talk together and 
understand each other. There is no unbroken stratum of 
illiterates. The groups of rich and speculative men, the "bad 
men" in business and affairs, whose freedoms are making the 
very name of "private enterprise" stink in the nostrils of the 
ordinary man, are only the more active section of very much 
larger classes, guilty perhaps of indolence and self-indulgence, 
but capable of being roused to a sense not merely of the wicked- 
ness but of the danger of systematic self-seeking in a strained, 
impoverished, and sorely tried world. 

In one way or another it seems inevitable now that the new 
standard of well-being which the mechanical revolution of the 
last century has rendered possible, should become the general 
standard of life. Revolution is conditional upon public dis- 
comfort. Social peace is impossible without a rapid ameliora- 
tion of the needless discomforts of the present time. A rapid 
resort to willing service and social reconstruction on the part 
of those who own and rule, or else a world-wide social revolu- 
tion leading towards an ecpialization of conditions and an at- 
tempt to secure comfort on new and untried lines, seem now to 
be the only alternatives before mankind. The choice which 
route shall be taken lies, we believe, in western Europe, and 
still more so in America, with the educated, possessing, and 
influential classes. The former route demands much sacrifice, 
for prosperous people in particular, a voluntary assumption of 
public duties and a voluntary acceptance of class discipline and 
self-denial ; the latter may take an indefinite time to traverse, 
it will certainly be a very destructive and bloody process, and 
whether it will lead to a new and better state of affairs at last 
is questionable. A social revolution, if ultimately the Western 
European States blunder into it, may prove to be a process ex- 
tending over centuries; it may involve a social breakdown as 
complete as that of the Roman Empire, and it may necessitate 
as slow a recuperation. 

§ 11 

We have dealt with the social and economic disorder of the 
European communities, and the rapid return of the "class-war" 



1062 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to the foreground of attention, before giving any account of 
the work of world settlement that centred on the Peace Confer- 
ence at Paris, because the worried and preoccupied state of 
everyone concerned with private problems of income, prices, 
emjjloyment, and the like goes far to explain the jaded atmos- 
phere in which that Conference addressed itself to the vast 
task before it. 

The story of the Conference turns very largely upon the ad- 
venture of one particular man, one of those men whom accident 
or personal quality picks out as a type to lighten the task of 
the historian. We have in the course of this history found it 
very helpful at times to focus our attention upon some indi- 
vidual, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Yuan Chwang, the Em- 
peror Frederick II and (diaries V and Napoleon I for example, 
and to let him by reflection illuminate the period in which he 
lived. The conclusion of the Great War can be seen most easily 
as the rise of the American President, President Wilson, to pre- 
dominant importance in the world's hopes and attention, and 
his failure to justify that predominance. 

President Wilson (born 1856) had previously been a promi- 
nent student and teacher of history, constitutional law, and the 
political sciences generally. He had held various professorial 
chairs, and had been President of Princeton University (I^ew 
Jersey). There is a long list of books to his credit, and they 
show a mind rather exclusively directed to American history and 
American politics. He was mentally the new thing in history, 
negligent of and rather ignorant of the older things out of 
w^hich his new world had arisen. He retired from academic 
life, and was elected Democratic Governor of J^ew Jersey in 
1910. In 1913 he became the Democratic presidential candi- 
date, and as a consequence of a violent quarrel between ex- 
President Koosevelt and President Taft, which split the domi- 
nant Eepublican party, he became President of the United 
States. 

The events of August, 1914, seem to have taken President 
Wilson, like the rest of his fellow-countrymen, by surprise. We 
find him cabling an offer of his services as a mediator on 
August 3rd. Then, for a time, he and America watched the 
conflict. At first neither the American people nor their Presi- 
dent seem to have had a very clear or profound understanding 
of that long-gathered catastrophe. Their tradition for a century 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 10(53 

had been to disregard the problems of the Old World, and it 
was not to be lightly changed. The imperialistic arrogance of 
the German Court and the stupid inclination of the Gennan 
military authorities towards melodramatic "frightfulness," their 
invasion of Belgium, their cruelties there, their use of poison 
gas, and the nuisance of their submarine campaign, created a 
deepening hostility to Germany in the United States as the 
war proceeded ; but the tradition of political abstinence and 
the deep-rooted persuasion that America possessed a political 
morality altogether superior to European conflicts, restrained 
the President from active intervention. He adopted a lofty 
tone. He professed to be unable to judge the causes and justice 
of the Great War. It was largely his high pacific attitude that 
secured his re-election as President for a second term. But 
the world is not to be mended by merely regarding evil-doers 
with an expression of rather undiscriminating disapproval. By 
the end of 1916 the Germans had been encouraged to believe 
that under no circumstances whatever would the United States 
fight, and in 1917 they began their unrestricted submarine war- 
fare and the sinking of American ships without notice. Presi- 
dent Wilson and the American people were dragged into the 
war by this supreme folly. And also they were dragged into a 
reluctant attempt to define their relations to Old World politics 
in some other terms than those of mere aloofness. Their 
thoughts and temper changed very rapidly. They came into 
the war side by side with the Allies, but not in any pact with 
the Allies. They came into the war, in the name of their own 
modern civilization, to punish and end an intolerable political 
and military situation. 

Slow and belated judgments are sometimes the best judg- 
ments. In a series of "notes," too long and various for detailed 
treatment in this Outline, thinking aloud, as it were, in the 
hearing of all mankind. President Wilson sought to state the 
essential differences of the American State from the Great 
Powers of the Old World. We have been at some pains in this 
history to make plain the development of these differences. He 
unfolded a conception of international relationships that came 
like a gospel, like the hope of a better world, to the whole eastern 
hemisphere. Secret agreements were to cease, "nations" were 
to determine their own destinies, militarist aggression was to 
cease, the seaways were to be free to all mankind. These com- 



1064 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

monplaces of American thought, these secret desires of every 
sane man, came like a great light upon the darkness of anger 
and conflict in Europe. At last, men felt, the ranks of diplo- 
macy were broken, the veils of Great Power "policy" were rent 
in twain. Here with authority, with the strength of a powerful 
new nation behind it, was the desire of the common man 
throughout the world, plaiuly said. 

Manifestly there was needed some over-riding instrument of 
government to establish world law and maintain these broad 
and liberal generalizations upon human intercourse. A number 
of schemes had floated in men's minds for the attainment of that 
end. In particular there was a movement for some sort of world 
league, a "League of Nations." The American President 
adopted this phrase and sought to realize it. An essential con- 
dition of the peace he sought through the overthrow of German 
imperialism was, he declared, to be this federal organ. This 
League of Nations was to be the final court of appeal in inter- 
national aifairs. It was to be the substantial realization of the 
peace. Here again he awakened a tremendous echo. 

President Wilson was the spokesman of a new age. Through- 
out the war, and for some little time after it had ended, he held, 
so far as the Old World was concerned, that exalted position. 
But in America, where they knew him better, there were doubts. 
And writing as we do now with the wisdom of subsequent events, 
we can understand these doubts. America, throughout a century 
and more of detachment and security, had developed new ideals 
and formula^ of political thought, without realizing with any 
intensity that, under conditions of stress and danger, these ideals 
and fonnulse might have to be passionately sustained. To her 
community many things were platitudes that had to the Old 
World communities, entangled still in ancient political compli- 
cations, the quality of a saving gospel. President Wilson was 
responding to the thought and conditions of his own people and 
his own country, based on a liberal tradition that had first found 
its full expression in English speech; but to Europe and Asia 
he seemed to be thinking and saying, for the first time in his- 
tory, things hitherto undeveloped and altogether secret. And 
that misconception he may have shared. 

We are dealing here with an able and successful professor of 
political science, who did not fully realize what he owed to his 
contemporaries and the literary and political atmosphere he bad 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1065 

breathed throughout his life ; and who passed very rapidly, after 
his re-election as President, from the mental attitudes of a po- 
litical leader to those of a Messiah. His ''notes" are a series of 
explorations of the elements of the world situation. When at 
last, in his address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, he pro- 
duced his Fourteen Points as a definite statement of the Ameri- 
can peace intentions, they were, as a statement, far better in 
their spirit than in their arrangement and matter. This docu- 
ment demanded open agreements between nations and an end 
to secret diplomacy, free navigation of the high seas, free com- 
merce, disarmament, and a number of political readjustments 
upon the lines of national independence. Finally in the Four- 
teenth Point it required *'a general association of nations" to 
guarantee the peace of the world. 

These Fourteen Points had an immense reception throughout 
the world. Here at last seemed a peace for reasonable men 
everywhere, as good and acceptable to honest and decent Ger- 
mans and Eussians, as to honest and decent Frenchmen and 
Englishmen and Belgians ; and for some months the whole world 
was lit by faith in Wilson. Could they have been made the 
basis of a world settlement in 1919, they would forthwith have 
opened a new and more hopeful era in human affairs. 

But, as we must tell, they did not do that. There was about 
President Wilson a certain egotism ; there was in the generation 
of people in the United States to whom this great occasion came, 
a generation born in security, reared in plenty and, so far as 
history goes, in ignorance, a generation remote from the tragic 
issues that had made Europe grave, a certain superficiality and 
lightness of mind. It was not that the American people were 
superficial by nature and necessity, but that they had never 
been deeply stirred by the idea of a human community larger 
than their own. It was an intellectual but not a moral convic- 
tion, with them. One had on the one hand these new people 
of the new world, with their new ideas, their finer and better 
ideas, of peace and world righteousness, and on the other the old, 
bitter, deeply entangled peoples of the Great Power system; 
and the former were crude and rather childish in their immense 
inexperieujce, and the latter were seasoned and bitter and in- 
tricate. The theme of this clash of the raw idealist youthfulness 
of a new age with the experienced ripeness of the old, was treated 
years ago by that great novelist, Henry James, in a very 



1066 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



typical story called Daisy Miller. It is the pathetic story of a 
frank, trustful, high-minded, but rather simple-minded Ameri- 
can girl, with a real disposition towards righteousness and a 
great desire for a "good time," and how she came to Europe 
and was swiftly entangled and put in the wrong, and at last 
driven to welcome death by the complex tortuousness and obsti- 
nate limitations of the older world. There have been a thou- 
sand variants of that theme in real life, a thousand such trans- 
Atlantic tragedies, and the story 
of President Wilson is one of 
them. But it is not to be sup- 
posed, because the new thing 
succumbs to the old infections, 
that is the final condemnation 
of the new thing. 

Probably no fallible human 
being manifestly trying to do 
his best amidst overwhelming 
circumstances has been sub- 
jected to such minute, search- 
ing, and pitiless criticism as 
President Wilson. He is 
blamed, and it would seem that 




Prc^sicLeut WULsou 



he is rightly blamed, for conducting the war and the ensuing 
peace negotiations on strictly party lines. He remained the 
President representing the American Democratic Party, when 
circumstances conspired to make him the representative of the 
general interests of mankind. He made no attempt to forget 
party issues for a time, and to incorporate with himself such 
great American leaders as ex-President Roosevelt, ex-President 
Taft, and the like. He did not draw fully upon the moral and 
intellectual resources of the States; he made the whole issue 
too personal, and he surrounded himself with merely personal 
adherents. And a still graver error was his decision to come to 
the Peace Conference himself. ^Nearly every experienced critic 
seems to be of opinion that he should have remained in Amer- 
ica, in the role of America, speaking occasionally as if a nation 
spoke. Throughout the concluding years of the war he had 
by t^^.at method achieved an unexampled position in the world. 
Says Dr. Dillon : ^ "Europe, when the President touched 
^In his book, The Peace Conference. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1067 



its shores, was as clay ready for the creative potter. Never 
before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who would 
take them to the long-jjromised land where wars are prohibited 
and blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was that 
great leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe 
and affection. Labour leaders in Paris told me that they shed 
tears of joy in his presence, and that their comrades would go 
through fire and water to help him to realize his noble schemes. 
To the working classes in Italy 
his name was a heavenly clarion 
at the sound of which the earth 
would be renewed. The Ger- 
mans regarded him and his 
humane doctrine as their sheet- 
anchor of safety. The fearless 
Herr Muehlon said : 'If Presi- 
dent Wilson were to address the 
Germans, and pronounce a 
severe sentence upon them, they 
would accept it with resigna- 
tion and without a murmur and 
set to work at once.' In Ger- 
man-Austria his fame was that 




!M^. Clctnctxccau 



of a saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm 
to the suffering and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted. . . ." 

Such was the overpowering expectation of the audience 
to which President Wilson prepared to show himself. He 
reached France on board the George Washingfon in December, 
1918. 

He brought his wife with him. That seemed no doubt a per- 
fectly natural and proper thing to an American mind. Quite 
a number of the American representatives brought their wives. 
Unhappily a social quality, nay, almost a tourist quality, was 
introduced into the world settlement by these ladies. Transport 
facilities were limited, and most of them arrived in Europe with 
a radiant air of privilege. They came as if they came to a 
treat. They were, it was intimated, seeing Europe under ex- 
ceptionally interesting circumstances. They would visit Ches- 
ter, or Warwick, or Windsor en route — for they might not have 
a chance of seeing these celebrated places again. Important 
interviews would be broken off to get in a visit to some "old 



1068 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



historical mansion." This may seem a trivial matter to note in 
a History of Mankind, but it was such small human things as 
this that threw a miasma of futility over the Peace Conference 
of 1919. In a little while one discovered that Wilson, the Hope 
of Mankind, had vanished, and that all the illustrated fashion 
papers contained pictures of a delighted tourist and his wife, 
grouped smilingly with crowned heads and such-like enviable 
company. ... It is so easy to be wise after the event, 
and to perceive that he should not have come over. 

The men he had chiefly to 
deal with, for example M. 
Clemenceau (France), Mr. 
Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour 
(Britain), Baron Sonnino and 
Signer Orlando (Italy), were 
men of widely dissimilar his- 
torical traditions. But in one 
respect they resembled him and 
appealed to his sympathies. 
They, too, were party poli- 
ticians, who had led their coun- 
try through the war. Like 
himself they had failed to 
grasp the necessity of entrust- 
ing the work of settlement to more specially qualified men. 
'"They were the merest novices in international affairs. Geog- 
raphy, ethnology, psychology, and political history were sealed 
books to them. Like the Rector of Louvain University, who 
told Oliver Goldsmith that, as he had become the head of that 
institution without knowing Greek, he failed to see why it 
should be taught there, the chiefs of State, having obtained the 
highest position in their respective countries without more than 
an inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the 
importance of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing 
the omission as they went along. . . ." ^ 

"What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible de- 
gree have been supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more 
happily endowed than themselves. But they deliberately chose 
mediocrities. It is a mark of genial spirits that they are well 
served, but the plenipotentiaries of the Conference were not 
^ Dillon. 




'yirJlov^l Geav^c 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1069 

characterized by it. Away in the background some of them had 
familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were wont 
to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight 
of the world-stage were gritless and pithless. 

"As the heads of the principal Governments implicitly 
claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race, and 
endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this 
claim was boldly challenged by the people's organs in the Press. 
Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the 
first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson 
being excepted. . . ." ^ 

The restriction upon our space in this Outline will not 
allow us to tell here how the Peace Conference shrank from a 
Council of Ten to a Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, 
Lloyd George, and Orlando), and how it became a conference 
less and less like a frank and open discussion of the future of 
mankind, and more and more like some old-fashioned diplomatic 
conspiracy. Great and wonderful had been the hopes that had 
gathered to Paris. "The Paris of the Conference," says Dr. 
Dillon, "ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast 
cosmopolitan caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of 
life and turmoil, filled with curious samples of the races, tribes, 
and tong-ues of four continents who came to watch and wait for 
the mysterious to-morrow. 

"An Arabian ISTights' touch was imparted to the dissolving 
panorama by strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, 
Korea and Aderbeijan, Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz — 
men with patriarchal beards and scimitar-shaped noses, and 
others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand and Bokhara. 
Turbans and fezes, sugar-loaf hats and head-gear resembling 
episcopal mitres, old military uniforms devised for the embry- 
onic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowy- 
white burnouses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like 
the Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy 
unreality in the city where the grimmest of realities were being 
faced and coped with. 

"Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial 
enterprise, and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, 
members of economic committees from the United States, 

' Dillon. And see his The Peace Conference, chapter iii, for instances 
of the amazing ignorance of various delegates. 



1070 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Britain, Italy, Poland, Enssia, India, and Japan, representa- 
tives of naphtha industries and far-oli" coal mines, pilgrims, 
fanatics and charlatans from all climes, priests of all religions, 
preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes, field- 
marshals, statesmen, anarchists, bnilders-up and pullers-down. 
All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in 
which the political and social systems of the world were to be 
melted and recast. Every day, in my walks, in my apartment, 
or at restaurants, I met emissaries from lands and peoples whose 
very names had seldom been heard of before in the West. A 
delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called on me, and dis- 
coursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun, Tripoli, 
Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed 
me that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent 
Greek Republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. 
The Albanians were represented by my old friend Turkhau 
Pasha, on the one hand, and by my friend Essad Pasha on the 
other — the former desirous of Italy's protection, the latter de- 
manding- complete independence. Chinamen, Japanese, Koreans, 
Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians, Mingrelians, 
Buryats, Malays, and l^egroes and Negi'oids from Africa and 
America were among the tribes and tongues foregathered in 
Paris to watch the rebuilding of the political world system and 
to see where they 'came in,' ..." 

To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, 
came President Wilson, and found its gathering forces domi- 
nated by a personality narrower, in every way more limited and 
beyond comparison more forcible than himself : the French Pre- 
mier, M. Clemenceau. At the instance of President Wilson, M. 
Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference. ''It was," 
said President Wilson, "a special tribute to the sufferings and 
sacrifices of France." And that, unhappily, sounded the key- 
note of the Conference, whose sole business should have been 
with the future of mankind. 

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was an old journalist poli- 
tician, a great denouncer of abuses, a great upsetter of govern- 
ments, a doctor who had, while a municipal councillor, kept a 
free clinic, and a fierce, experienced duellist. None of his 
duels ended fatally, but he faced them with great intrepidity. 
He had passed from the medical school to republican journalism 
in the days of the Empire. In those days he was an extremist 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1071 

of the left. He was for a time a teacher in America, and be 
married and divorced an American wife. He was thirty in the 
eventful year 1871. He returned to France after Sedan, and 
flung himself into the stormy politics of the defeated nation 
with great fire and vigour. Thereafter France was his world, 
the France of vigorous journalism, high-spirited personal quar- 
rels, challenges, confrontations, scenes, dramatic effects, and 
witticisms at any cost. He was what people call ''fierce stuff," 
he was nicknamed the "Tiger," and he seems to have been rather 
proud of bis nickname. Professional patriot rather than states- 
man and thinker, this was the man whom the war had flung up 
to misrepresent the fine mind and the generous spirit of France. 
His limitations had a profound effect upon the conference, which 
was further coloured by the dramatic resort for the purpose of 
signature to the very Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in which 
Germany bad triumphed and proclaimed her unity. There the 
Germans were to sign. To M. Clemenceau and to France, in 
that atmosphere, the war ceased to seem a world war ; it was 
merely the sequel of the previous conflict of the Terrible Year, 
the downfall and punishment of offending Germany. "The 
world had to be made safe for democracy," said President Wil- 
son. That from j\I. Clemenceau's expressed point of view was 
"talking like Jesus Christ." The world had to be made safe 
for Paris. "Talking like Jesus Christ" seemed a very ridicu- 
lous thing to many of those brilliant rather than sound diplo- 
matists and politicians who made the year 1919 supreme in the 
history of human insufficiency. 

(Another flash of the "Tiger's" wit, it may be noted, was 
that President Wilson with bis fourteen points was "worse" 
than God Almighty. "Le bon Dieu" only had ten. . . •) 

M. Clemenceau sat with Signer Orlando in the more central 
chairs of a semicircle of four in front of the fire, says Keynes. 
He wore a black frock-coat and grey suede gloves, which he 
never removed during these sessions. He was, it is to be noted, 
the only one of these four reconstructors of the world who could 
understand and speak both French and English. 

The aims of M. Clemenceau were simple and in a manner 
attainable. He wanted all the settlement of 1871 undone. He 
wanted Germany punished as though she was a uniquely sinful 
nation and France a sinless martyr land. He wanted Germany 
so crippled and devastated as never more to be able to stand up 



1072 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

to France. He wanted to hurt and linmiliate Germany more 
than France had been hurt and humiliated in 1871. He did 
not care if in breaking Germany Europe was broken ; his mind 
did not go far enough beyond the Ehine to understand that possi- 
bility. He accepted President Wilson's Leag-ue of Nations as 
an excellent proposal if it would guarantee the security of 
France whatever she did, but he preferred a binding alliance 
of the United States and England to maintain, uphold, and 
glorify France under practically any circumstances. He wanted 
wider opportunities for the exploitation of Syria, ISTorth Africa, 
and so forth by Parisian financial groups. He wanted indemni- 
ties to recuperate France, loans, gifts, and tributes to France, 
glory and homage to France. France had suffered, and France 
had to be rewarded. Belgium, Russia, Serbia, Poland, Armenia, 
Britain, Germany, and Austria had all suffered too, all man- 
kind had suffered, but what would you ? That was not his affair. 
These were the supers of a drama in which France was for him 
the star. ... In much the same spirit Signer Orlando seems 
to have sought the welfare of Italy. 

Mr. Lloyd George brought to the Council of Four the subtlety 
of a Welshman, the intricacy of a European, and an urgent 
necessity for respecting the nationalist egotism of the British 
imperialists and capitalists who had returned him to power. 
Into the secrecy of that council went President Wilson with 
the very noblest aims for his newly discovered American world 
policy, his rather hastily compiled Fourteen Points, and a 
project rather than a scheme for a League of Nations. 

''There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank 
more incompetent than the President in the agilities of the 
Council Chamber." From the whispering darknesses and fire- 
side disputes of that council, and after various comings and 
goings we cannot here describe, he emerged at last with his 
Fourteen Points pitifully torn and dishevelled, but with a little 
puling infant of a League of Nations, which might die or which 
might live and grow — no one could tell. This history cannot 
tell. We are at the end of our term. But that much, at least, 
he had saved. . . . 

§ 12 

This homunculus in a bottle which it was hoped might be- 
come at last Man ruling the Earth, this League of Nations as 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1073 

it was embodied in the Covenant of April 28tli, 1919, was not a 
leagTie of peoples at all ; it was the world discovered, a league 
of "states, dominions, or colonies." It was stipulated that these 
should be "fully self-governing," but there was no definition 
whatever of this phrase. There was no bar to a limited franchise 
and no provision for any direct control by the people of any 
state. India figured — presumably as a "fully self-governing 
state !" An autocracy would no doubt have been admissible as 
a "fully self-governing" democrac}^ with a franchise limited to 
one person. The League of the Covenant of 1919 was, in fact, 
a league of "representatives" of foreigii offices, and it did not 
even abolish the nonsense of embassies at every capital. The 
British Empire appeared once as a whole, and then India ( !) 
and the four dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and 
ISTew Zealand appeared as separate sovereigii states. The Indian 
representative was, of course, sure to be merely a British nomi- 
nee; the other four would be colonial politicians. But if the 
British Empire was to be thus dissected, a representative of 
Great Britain should have been substituted for the Imperial 
representative, and Ireland and Eg}^pt should also have been 
given representation. Moreover, either New York State or 
Virginia was historically and legally almost as much a sovereign 
state as ISTew Zealand or Canada. The inclusion of India raised 
logical claims for French Africa and French Asia. One French 
representative did propose a separate vote for the little princi- 
pality of Monaco. 

There was to be an assembly of the League in which every- 
member state was to be represented and to have an equal voice, 
but the working directorate of the League was to vest in a 
Council, which was to consist of the representatives of the 
United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, with four 
other members elected by the Assembly. The Council was to 
meet once a year; the gatherings of the Assembly were to be 
at '"stated intervals," not stated. 

Except in certain specified instances the league of this Cove- 
nant could make only unanimous decisions. One dissentient on 
the council could bar any proposal — on the lines of the old 
Polish liberum veto (Chapter XXXV, § 7). This was a quite 
disastrous provision. To many minds it made the Covenant 
League rather less desirable than no league at all. It was a 
complete recognition of the unalienable sovereignty of states, 



1074 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and a repudiation of the idea of an overriding commonweal 
of mankind. This provision practically barred the way to all 
amendments to the league constitution in fntnre except by the 
clumsy expedient of a simultaneous withdrawal of the majority 
of member states desiring a change, to form the league again 
on new lines. The covenant made inevitable such a final wind- 
ing-up of the league it created, and that was perhaps the best 
thing about it. 

The following powers, it was proposed, should be excluded 
from the original league : Germany, Austria, Russia, and what- 
ever remains there were of the Turkish Empire. But any of 
these might subsequently be included with the assent of two- 
thirds of the Assembly. The original membership of the league 
as specified in the projected Covenant was: the United States 
of America, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, the British Empire 
(Canada, Australia, South Africa, 'New Zealand, and India), 
China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the 
Hedjaz, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, 
Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, the Serb-Croat-Slovene 
State, Siam, Czecho-Slovakia, and LTrugiiay. To which were 
to be added by invitation the following powers which had been 
neutral in the war: the Argentine Republic, Chile, Colombia, 
Denmark, Holland, Norway, Paragauiy, Persia, Salvador, Spain, 
Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela. 

Such being the constitution of the league, it is scarcely to be 
wondered at that its powers were special and limited. It was 
given a seat at Geneva and a secretariat. It had no powers 
even to inspect the military preparations of its constituent states, 
or to instruct a military and naval stafl^ to plan out the armed 
co-operation needed to keep the peace of the world. The French 
representative in the League of Nations Commission, M. Leon 
Bourgeois, insisted lucidly and repeatedly on the logical neces- 
sity of such powers. As a speaker he was rather copious and 
lacking in "spice" of the Clemenceau quality. The final scene 
in the plenary session of April 28th, before the adoption of the 
Covenant, is described compactly by Mr. Wilson Harris, the 
crowded Banqueting Hall at the Quai d'Orsay, with its "E" 
of tables for the delegates, with secretaries and officials lining 
the walls and a solid mass of journalists at the lower end of 
the room. "At the head of the room the 'Big Three' diverted 
themselves in undertones at the expense of the worthy M. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1075 




1076 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Bourgeois, now launched, with the help of what must have been 
an entirely superfluous sheaf of notes, on the fifth rendering of 
his speech in support of his famous amendments." 

They were so often ''diverting themselves in undertones," 
those three men whom God had mocked with the most tre- 
mendous opportunity in history. Keynes {op. cit.) gives other 
instances of the levities, vulgarities, disregards, inattentions, 
and inadequacies of these meetings. 

This poor covenant arrived at in this fashion returned with 
President Wilson to America, and there it was subjected to an 
amount of opposition, criticism, and revision which showed, 
among other things, how relatively unimpaired was the mental 
energy of the United States. The Senate refused to ratify the 
covenant, and the first meeting of the League Council was held 
therefore without American representatives. The close of 1919 
and the opening months of 1920 saw a very curious change 
come over American feeling after the pro-French and pro- 
British enthusiasms of the war period. The peace nego- 
tiations reminded the Americans, in a confused and very 
irritating way, of their profound difi^erences in international 
outlook from any European power that the war had for a time 
helped them to forget. They felt they had been "rushed" into 
many things without due consideration. They experienced a 
violent revulsion towards that policy of isolation that had broken 
down in 1917. The close of 1919 saw a phase, a very under- 
standable phase, of passionate and even violent "Americanism," 
in which European imperialism and European socialism were 
equally anathema. There may have been a sordid element in 
the American disposition to "cut" the moral responsibilities the 
United States had incurred in the affairs of the Old World, and 
to realize the enormous financial and political advantages the 
war had given the new world; but the broad instinct of the 
American people seems to have been sound in its distrust of the 
proposed settlement. 

§ 13 

The main terms of the Treaties of 1919-20 with which the 
Conference of Paris concluded its labours can be stated much 
more vividly by a few maps than by a written abstract. We 
need scarcely point out how much those treaties left unsettled. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1077 




1078 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

but we may perhaps enumerate some of the more salient breaches 
of the Twelve that survived out of the Fourteen Points at the 
opening of the Conference, 

One initial cause of nearly all those breaches lay, we believe, 
in the complete unpreparedness and unwillingness of that pre- 
existing league of nations, subjected states and exploited areas, 
the British Empire, to submit to any dissection and adaptation 
of its system or to any control of its naval and aerial annament. 
A kindred contributory cause was the equal unpreparedness of 
the American mind for any interference with the ascendancy of 
the United States in the New World (compare Secretary Olney's 
declaration in this chapter, § 6). Neither of those Great Powers, 
who were necessarily dominant and leading powers at Paris, 
had properly thought out the implications of a League of 
Nations in relation to these older arrangements, and so their 
support of that project had to most European observers a curi- 
ously hypocritical air; it was as if they wished to retain and 
ensure their own vast predominance and security while at the 
same time restraining any other power from such expansions, 
annexations, and alliances as might create a rival and competi- 
tive imperialism. Their failure to set an example of interna- 
tional confidence destroyed all possibility of international con- 
fidence in the other nations represented at Paris. 

Even more unfortunate was the refusal of the Americans to 
assent to the Japanese demand for a recognition of racial 
equality. 

Moreover, the foreign offices of the British, the French, and 
the Italians were haunted by traditional schemes of aggression 
entirely incompatible with the new ideas. A League of Nations 
that is to be of any appreciable value to mankind must super- 
sede imperialisms; it is either a super-imperialism, a liberal 
world-empire of united states, participant or in tutelage, or it 
is nothing; but few of the people at the Paris Conference had 
the mental vigour even to assert this obvious consequence of 
the League proposal. They wanted to be at the same time bound 
and free, to ensure peace for ever, but to keep their weapons 
in their hands. Accordingly the old annexation projects of the 
Great Power period were hastily and thinly camouflaged as 
proposed acts of this poor little birth of April 28th. The newly 
born and barely animate League was represented to be dis- 
tributing, with all the reckless munificence of a captive pope, 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1079 




1080 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

''mandates'' to the old imperialisms that, had it been the young 
Hercules we desired, it would certainly have strangled in its 
cradle. Britain was to have extensive "mandates" in Mesopo- 
tamia and East Africa ; France was to have the same in Syria ; 
Italy was to have all her holdings to the west and south-east 
of Egypt consolidated as mandatory territory. Clearly, if the 
weak thing that was being nursed by its Secretary in its cradle 
at Geneva into some semblance of life, did presently succumb 
to the infantile weakness of all institutions born without pas- 
sion, all these "mandates" would become frank annexations. 
Moreover, all the Powers fought tooth and nail at the Confer- 
ence for "strategic" frontiers— the ugliest symptom of all. Why 
should a state want a strategic frontier unless it contemplates 
war? If on that j^lea Italy insisted upon a subject population 
of Germans in the southern Tyrol and a subject population of 
Yugo-Slavs in Dalmatia, and if little Greece began landing- 
troops in Asia Minor, neither France nor Britain was in a posi- 
tion to rebuke these outbreaks of pre-millennial method. 

We will not enter here into any detailed account of how 
President Wilson gave way to the Japanese and consented to 
their replacing the Germans at Kiau Chau, which is Chinese 
property, how the almost purely German city of Danzig was 
practically, if not legally, annexed- to Poland, and how the 
Powers disputed over the claim of the Italian imperialists, a 
claim strengthened by these instances, to seize the Yugo-Slav port 
of Fiume and deprive the Yugo-Slavs of a good Adriatic outlet. 
Nor will we do more than note the complex arrangements and 
justifications that put the French in possession of the Saar val- 
ley, which is German territory, or the entirely iniquitous breach 
of the right of "self-determination" which practically forbade 
German Austria to unite— as it is natural and proper that she 
should unite — with the rest of Germany. These burning ques- 
tions of 1919-20 which occupied the newspapers and the minds 
of statesmen and politicians, and filled all our wastepaper 
baskets with propaganda literature, may seem presently very 
incidental things in the larger movement of these times. All 
these disputes, like the suspicions and tetchy injustices of a 
weary and irritated man, may lose their importance as the tone 
of the world improves, and the still inadequately apprehended 
lessons of the Great War and the Petty Peace that followed it, 
begin to be digested by the general intelligence of mankind. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1081 

It is worth while for the reader to compare the treaty maps 
we give with what we have called the natural political map of 
Europe. The now arrangements do approach this latter more 
closely than any previous system of boundaries. It may be a 
necessary preliminary to any satisfactory league of peoples, 
that each people should first be in something like complete 
possession of its own household, 

§ 14 

A FORECAST OF THE NEXT WAR 

The failure to produce a more satisfactory world settlement 
in 1919-20 was, we have suggested, a symptom of an almost 
universal intellectual and moral lassitude resulting from the 
overstrain of the Great War. A lack of fresh initiative is 
characteristic of a fatigue phase ; everyone, for sheer inability 
to change, drifts on for a time along the lines of mental habit 
and precedent. 

Nothing could be more illustrative of this fatigue inertia than 
the expressed ideas of military men at this time. It will round 
off this chapter in an entirely significant way, and complete 
our picture of the immense world interrogation on which our 
history must end, if we give here the briefest summary of a 
lecture that was delivered to a gathering of field-marshals, gen- 
erals, major-generals, and the like by Major-General Sir Louis 
Jackson at the Royal United Service Institution in Lon- 
don one day in December, 1919. Lord Peel, the British Under- 
Secretary for War, presided, and the reader must picture to 
himself the not too large and quite dignified room of assembly 
in that building, and all these fine, grave, soldierly figures 
quietly intent upon the lecturer's words. He is describing, 
with a certain subdued enthusiasm, the probable technical de- 
velopments of military method in the ''next war." 

Outside, through the evening twilight of Whitehall, flows 
the London traffic, not quite so abundant as in 1914, but still 
fairly abundant ; the omnibuses all overcrowded because there 
are now not nearly enough of them, and the c' .thing of people 
generally shabbier. Some little way down Wiiitehall is a tem- 
porary erection, the Cenotaph, with its base smothered with a 
vast, pathetic heap of decaying wreaths, bunches of flowers, and 
the like, a cenotaph to commemorate the eight hundred thou- 



1082 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

sand young men of the Empire who have been killed in the 
recent straggle. A few people are putting fresh flowers and 
wreaths there. One or two are crying. 

The prospect stretches out beyond this gathering into the 
grey vastness of London, where people are now crowded as 
they have never been crowded before, whose food is dear and 
employment more uncertain than it has ever been. But let not 
the spectacle be one of unrelieved gloom ; Regent Street, Oxford 
Street, and Bond Street are bright with shoppers and congested 
with new automobiles, because we must remember that every- 
body does not lose by a war. Beyond London the country sinks 
into night, and across the narrow sea are North France and 
Belgium devastated, Germany with scores of thousands of her 
infants dwindling and dying for want of milk, all Austria starv- 
ing. Half the population of Vienna, it is believed unless 
American relief comes quickly, is doomed to die of hardship 
before the spring. Beyond that bleak twilight stretches the 
darkness of Russia. There, at least, no rich people are buying 
anything, and no military men are reading essays on the next 
war. But in icy Petrograd is little food, little wood, and no 
coal. All the towns of Russia southward as far as the snow 
reaches are in a similar plight, and in the Ukraine and to the 
south a ragged and dingy war drags to its end. Europe is 
bankrupt, and people's pockets rustle with paper money whose 
purchasing power dwindles as they walk about with it. 

But now we will return to Sir Louis in the well-lit room at 
the United Service Institution. 

He was of opinion — we follow the report in next morning's 
Times ^ — that we were merely on the eve of the most extensive 
modifications of the art of war known to history. It behoved us, 
therefore — us being, of course, the British and not the whole 
of mankind — to get on with our armaments and to keep ahead ; 
a fine opening generalization. ''It was necessary to develop 
new arms. . . . The nation which best did so would have a 
great advantage in the next war. There were people who were 
crying aloud for a reduction of armaments " 

(But there the Director of Trench Warfare and Supplies 
was wrong. They were just crying at the cenotaph, poor, soft, 

^ Checked by subsequent comparison with the published article in the 
Jour, of the Roy United Service Institution, vol. Ixv No. 457, February, 
1920. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 1083 

and stupid souls, because a son or a brother or a father was 
dead.) 

Sir Louis believed that one of the greatest developments in 
the art of warfare would be brought about in mechanical trans- 
port. The tank he treated with ingratitude. These military 
gentlemen are ungrateful to an invention which shoved and 
butted them into victory almost in spite of themselves. The 
tank, said Sir Louis, was "sl freak, . . . The outstanding fea- 
ture" of the tank, he said, was that it made mechanical trans- 
port independent of the roads. Hitherto armies on the march 
had only been able to spoil the roads; now their transport 
on caterpillar wheels would advance in open order on a broad 
front carrying guns, munitions, supplies, bridging equipment, 
rafts, and men — and incidentally ploughing up and destroying 
hedges, ditches, fields, and cultivation generally. Armies 
would wallow across the country, leaving nothing behind but 
dust and mud. 

So our imaginations are led up to the actual hostilities. 

Sir Louis was in favour of gas. For punitive expeditions 
particularly, gas was to be recommended. And here he startled 
and disconcerted his hearers by a gleam of something approach- 
ing sentimentality. "It might be possible," he said, ''to come 
to some agreement that no gas should be used which caused 
unnecessary suffering." But there his heart spoke rather than 
his head; it should have been clear to him that if law can so 
far override warfare as to prohibit any sort of evil device 
whatever, it can override warfare to the extent of prohibiting 
it altogether. And where would Sir Louis Jackson and his 
audience be then ? War is war ; its only law is the law that 
the maximum destruction of the forces of the enemy is neces- 
sary. To that law in warfare all considerations of humanity 
and justice are subordinate. 

From gas Sir Louis passed to the air. Here he predicted 
"most important advances. , . , We need not trouble ourselves 
yet with flying destroyers or flying concrete forts, but in twenty 
years' time the Air Force Estimates might be the most impor- 
tant part of our preparations for war." He discussed the con- 
version of commercial flying machines to bombing and recon- 
naissance uses, and the need for special types of fighting ma- 
chine in considerable numbers and always ready. He gave 
reasons for supposing that the bombers in the next war would 



1084 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

not have the same targets near the front of the armies, and 
would secure better results by going further afield and bombing 
the centres 'Svhere stores are being manufactured and troops 
trained." As everyone who stayed in London or the east of 
England in 1917-18 knows, this means the promiscuous bomb- 
ing of any and every centre of population. But, of course, 
the bombing of those 'prentice days would be child's play to 
the bombing of the "next war." There would be countless more 
aeroplanes, bigger and much nastier bombs. . . . 

Sir Louis, proceeding with the sketch, mentioned the "de- 
struction of the greater part of London" as a possible incident 
in the coming struggle. And so on to the culminating moral, 
that the highest pay, the utmost importance, the freest expendi- 
ture, must be allowed to military gentlemen, "The expense 
entailed is in the nature of an absolutely necessary insurance." 
With which his particular audience warmly agreed. And a 
certain Major-General Stone, a little forgetful of the source of 
his phrases,^ said he hoped that this lecture "may be the 
beginning not of trusting in the League of !N"ations, but in 
our own right hand and our stretched-out arm!" 

But we will not go on with the details of this dream. For 
indeed no Utopia was ever so impossible as this forecast of a 
world in which scarcely anything but very carefully sandbagged 
and camouflaged G.H.(^. would be reasonably safe, in which 
countless bombers would bomb the belligerent lands incessantly 
and great armies with lines of caterpillar transport roll to 
and fro, churning the fields of the earth into blood-streaked mud. 
There is not energy enough and no will whatever left in the 
world for such things. Generals who cannot foresee tanks 
cannot be expected to foresee or understand world bankniptcy ; 
still less are they likely to understand the limits imposed upon 
military operations by the fluctuating temper of the common 
man. Apparently these military authorities of the United 
Service Institution did not even know that warfare aims at the 
production of states of mind in the enemy, and is sustained by 
states of mind. The chief neglected factor in the calculations 
of Sir Louis is the fact that no people whatever will stand 
such warfare as he contemplates, n«t even the people on the 
winning side. For as northern France, south-eastern Britain, 
and north Italy now understand, the victor in the "next war" 
^Cp. Psalm cxxxvi. 



THE CATASTROPHE OF 1914 



1085 



may be bombed and starved almost as badly as the loser. A 
phase is possible in which a war-tormented population may 
cease to discriminate between military gentlemen on this side 
or that, and may be moved to destroy them as the common 
enemies of the race. The Great War of 1914-18 was the cul- 
mination of the military energy of the Western populations, 
and they fought and fought well because they believed they 
were fighting ''the war to end war." They were. German 
imperialism, with its organized grip upon education and its 
close alliance with an aggressive commercialism, was beaten 
and finished. The militarism and imperialism of Britain and 
France and Italy are by comparison feeble, disorganized, and 
disorganizing survivals. They are things "left over" by the 
Great War. They have no persuasive power. They go on — 
for sheer want of wits to leave oif. 'No European Government 
will ever get the same proportion of its people into the ranks 
and into its munition works again as the governments of 1914- 
18 did. Our world is very weak and feeble still (1920), but 
its war fever is over. Its temperature is, if anything, sub- 
normal. It is doubtful if it will take the fever again for a long 
time. The alterations in the conditions of warfare are already 
much profounder than such authorities as Sir Louis Jackson 
suspect.^ 

^Here is another glimpse of tlie agreeable dreams that fill the contem- 
porary military mind. It is from Fuller's recently published Tanks in 
the Great War. Colonel Fuller does not share that hostility to tanks 
characteristic of the older type of soldier. In the next war, he tells us: 
"Fast-moving tanks, equipped witli tons of liquid gas . . . will cross the 
frontier and obliterate every living thing in the fields and farms, the 
villages, and cities of the enemy's country. Whilst life is being swept 
away around the frontier, fleets of aeroplanes will attack the enemy's 
great industrial and governing centres. All these attacks will be made, 
at first, not against the enemy's army . . . but against the civil popula- 
tion, in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker." 

For a good, well-balanced account of what modern war really means, 
see Philip Gibbs, Realities of War. 



XL 

THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTOKY 

§ 1. The Possible Unification of Men's Wills in Political Mat- 
ters. § 2. How a Federal World Government may Come 
About. § 3. Some Fundamental Clmracteristics of a Modern 
World State. § 4. What this World Might be were it under 
one Law and Justice. 

§ 1 

WE have brought this Outline of History up to the thresh- 
old of our own times, but we have brought it to no 
conclusion. It breaks off at a dramatic phase of ex- 
pectation. Xobody believes that the system of settlements 
grouped about the Treaty of Versailles is a permanent arrange- 
ment of the world's aifairs. These Treaties were the end of 
the war and not the establishment of a new order in the world. 
That new order has now to be established. In social and eco- 
nomic as in international aifairs we are in the dawn of a great 
constructive eifort. The story of life which began inestimable 
millions of years ago, the adventure of mankind which was al- 
ready afoot half a million years ago, rises to a crisis in the 
immense interrogation of to-day. The drama becomes our- 
selves. It is you, it is I, it is all that is happening to us and 
all that we are doing which will supply the next chapter of 
this continually expanding adventure of mankind. 

Our history has traced a steady growth of the social and 
political units into which men have combined. In the brief pe- 
riod of ten thousand years these units have grown from the 
small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast 
united realms — vast yet still too small and partial — of the 
present time. And this change in size of the state — a change 
manifestly incomplete — has been accompanied by profound 
changes in its nature. Compulsion and servitude have given 
way to ideas of associated freedom, and the sovereignty that 
1086 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1087 

was once concentrated in an autocratic king and god, has been 
widely diffused throughout the community. Until the Eoman 
republic extended itself to all Italy, there had been no free 
community larger than a city state ; all great communities were 
communities of obedience under a monarch. The great united 
republic of the United States would have been impossible 
before the printing press and the railway. The telegi-aph 
and telephone, the aeroplane, the continual progress of land 
and sea transit, are now insisting upon a still larger political 
organization. 

If our Outline has been faithfully drawn, and if these brief 
conclusions are sound, it follows that we are engaged upon an 
immense task of adjustment to these great lines upon which our 
aifairs are moving. Our wars, our social conflict, our enor- 
mous economic stresses, are all aspects of that adjustment. 
The loyalties and allegiances to-day are at best provisional 
loyalties and allegiances. Our true State, this state that is 
already beginning, this state to which every man owes his ut- 
most political effort, must be now this nascent Federal World 
State to which human necessities point. Our true God now 
is the God of all men. Nationalism as a God must follow the 
tribal gods to limbo. Our true nationality is mankind. 

How far will modem men lay hold upon and identify them- 
selves with this necessity and set themselves to revise their ideas, 
remake their institutions, and educate the coming generations 
to this final extension of citizenship? How far will they re- 
main dark, obdurate, habitual, and traditional, resisting the 
convergent forces that offer them either unity or misery ? 
Sooner or later that unity must come or else plainly men must 
perish by their own inventions. We, because we believe in the 
power of reason and in the increasing good will in men, find 
ourselves compelled to reject the latter possibility. But the 
way to the former may be very long and tedious, very tragic 
and wearisome, a martydom of many generations, or it may be 
travelled over almost swiftly in the course of a generation or so. 
That depends upon forces whose nature we understand to some 
extent now, but not their power. There has to be a great proc- 
ess of education, by precept and by information and by ex- 
perience, but there are as yet no quantitative measures of edu- 
cation to tell us how much has to be learnt or hoiu soon that 
learning can be done. Our estimates vary with our moods ; the 



1088 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

time may be much longer than our liopes and much shorter than 
our fears. 

The terrible experiences of the Great War have made very 
many men who once took political things lightly take them nou^ 
very gravely. To a certain small number of men and women 
the attainment of a world peace has become the supreme work 
in life, has become a religious self-devotion. To a much greater 
number it has become at least a ruling motive. Many such 
people now are seeking ways of working for this gi-eat end, 
or they are already working for this great end, by pen and 
persuasion, in schools and colleges and books, and in the 
highways and byways of public life. Perhaps now most 
human beings in the world are well-disposed towards such ef- 
forts, but rather confusedly disposed; they are without any 
clear sense of what must be done and what ought to be pre- 
vented, that human solidarity may be advanced. The world- 
wide outbreak of faith and hope in President Wilson, before 
he began to wilt and fail us, was a very significant thing 
indeed for the future of mankind. Set against these motives 
of unity indeed are other motives entirely antagonistic, the 
fear and hatred of strange things and peoples, love of and trust 
in the old traditional thing, patriotisms, race prejudices, sus- 
picions, distrusts — and the elements of spite, scoundrelism, and 
utter selfishness that are so strong still in every human soul. 

The overriding powers that hitherto in the individual soul 
and in the community have struggled and prevailed against 
the ferocious, base, and individual impulses that divide us from 
one another, have been the powers of religion and education. 
Religion and education, those closely interwoven influences, 
have made possible the greater human societies whose growth 
we have traced in this Outline; they have been the chief syn- 
thetic forces throughout this great story of enlarging human 
co-operations that we have traced from its beginnings. W^e 
have found in the intellectual and theological conflicts of the 
nineteenth century the explanation of that curious exceptional 
disentanglement of religious teaching from formal education 
which is a distinctive feature of our age, and we have traced 
the consequences of this phase of religious disputation and con- 
fusion in the reversion of international politics towards a brutal 
nationalism and in the backward drift of industrial and busi- 
ness life towards harsh, selfish, and uncreative profit-seeking. 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1089 

There has been a slipping off of ancient restraints; a real de- 
civilization of men's minds. We wonld lay stress here on the 
suggestion that this divorce of religious teaching from organ- 
ized education is necessarily a temporary one, a transitory dis- 
location, and that presently education must become again in 
intention and spirit religious, and that the impulse to devo- 
tion, to universal service and to a complete escape from self, 
which has been the common underlying force in all the great 
religions of the last five and twenty centuries, an impulse which 
ebbed so perceptibly during the prosperity, laxity, disillusion- 
ment, and scepiticism of the past seventy or eighty years, will 
reappear again, stripped and plain, as the recognized funda- 
mental structural impulse in human society. 

Education is the preparation of the individual for the com- 
munity, and his religious training is the core of that prepara- 
tion. With the great intellectual restatements and expansions 
of the nineteenth century, an educational break-up, a confu- 
sion and loss of aim in education, was inevitable. We can no 
longer prepare the individual for a community when our ideas 
of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction. 
The old loyalties, the old too limited and narrow political and 
social assumptions, the old too elaborate religious formulae, 
have lost their power of conviction, and the greater ideas of a 
world state and of an economic commonweal have been win- 
ning their way only very slowly to recognition. So far they 
have swayed only a minority of exceptional people. But out 
of the trouble and tragedy of this present time there may 
emerge a moral and intellectual revival, a religious revival, of a 
simplicity and scope to draw together men of alien races and 
now discrete traditions into one common and sustained way 
of living for the world's service. We cannot foretell the scope 
and power of such a revival ; we cannot even produce evidence 
of its onset. The beginnings of such things are never con- 
spicuous. Great movements of the racial soul come at first ''like 
a thief in the night," and then suddenly are discovered to be 
powerful and world-wide. Religious emotion — stripped of cor- 
ruptions and freed from its last priestly entanglements — may 
presently blow through life again like a great wind, bursting 
the doors and flinging open the shutters of the individual life, 
and making many things possible and easy that in these present 
days of exhaustion seem almost too difficult to desire. 



1090 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 



If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in 
men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of his- 
tory, an effective will for a world peace — that is to say, an 
effective will for a world law under a ivorld government — for in 
no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable — in what 
manner may we expect things to move towards this end ? That 
movement will certainly not go on equally in every country, 
nor is it likely to take at first one uniform mode of expression. 
Here it will find a congenial and stimulating atmosphere, here 
it will find itself antagonistic to deep tradition or racial idio- 
syncrasy or well-organized base oppositions. In some cases 
those to whom the call of the new order has come will be living 
in a state almost ready to serve the ends of the greater political 
synthesis, in others they will have to fight like conspirators 
against the rule of evil laws. There is little in the political 
constitution of such countries as the United States or Switzer- 
land that would impede their coalescence upon terms of frank 
give and take with other equally civilized confederations; 
political systems involving dependent areas and "subject peo- 
ples" such as the Turkish Empire was before the Great War, 
seem to require something in the nature of a breaking up before 
they can be adapted to a federal world system. Any state 
obsessed by traditions of an aggressive foreign policy will be 
difficult to assimilate into a world combination. But though 
here the government may be helpful, and here dark and hos- 
tile, the essential task of men of goodwill in all states and 
countries remains the same, it is an educational task, and its 
very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, 
as a necessary basis for world co-operation, a new telling and 
interpretation, a common interpretation, of history. 

Does this League of Kations which has been created by the 
covenant of 1919 contain within it the germ of any permanent 
federation of human effort ? Will it grow into something for 
which, as Stallybrass says, men will be ready to "work whole- 
heartedly and, if necessary, fight" — as hitherto they have been 
willing to fight for their country and their own people ? There 
are few intimations of any such enthusiasm for the League at 
the present time. The LeagT^e does not even seem to know how 
to talk to common men. It has gone into official buildings, and 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1091 

comparatively few people in the world understand or care what 
it is doing there. It may be that the League is no more than 
a first project of union, exemplary only in its insufficiencies 
and dangers, destined, to be superseded by something closer 
and completer as were the United States Articles of (Confedera- 
tion by the Federal Constitution. The League is at present 
a mere partial league of governments and states. It empha- 
sizes nationality; it defers to sovereignty. What the world 
needs is no such league of nations as this nor even a mere 
league of peoples, but a world league of men. The world per- 
ishes unless sovereignty is merged and nationality subordinated. 
And for that the minds of men must first be prepared by ex- 
perience and knowledge and thought. The supreme task before 
men at the present time is political education. 

It may be that several partial leagues may precede any world 
league. The common misfortunes and urgent common needs 
of Europe and Asia may be more efficacious in bringing the 
European and Asiatic states to reason and a sort of unity, than 
the mere intellectual and sentimental ties of the United States 
and Great Britain and France. A United States of the Old 
World is a possibility to set against the possibility of an At- 
lantic union. Moreover, there is much to be said for an Ameri- 
can experiment, a Pan-American leagTie, in which the New 
World European colonies would play an in-and-out part as 
Luxembourg did for a time in the German confederation. 

We will not attempt to weigh hero what share may be taken 
in the recasting and consolidation of human affairs by the 
teachings and propaganda of labour internationalism, by the 
studies and needs of international finance, or by such boundary- 
destroying powers as science and art and historical teaching. 
All these things may exert a combined pressure, in which it may 
never be possible to apportion the exact shares. Opposition 
may dissolve, antagonistic cults flatten out to a common culture, 
almost imperceptibly. The bold idealism of to-day may seem 
mere common sense to-morrow. And the problem of a fore- 
cast is complicated by the possibilities of interludes and back- 
waters. History has never gone simply forward. More 
particularly are the years after a great war apt to be years 
of apparent retrocession; men are too weary to see what has 
been done, what has been cleared away, and what has been 
made possible. 



1092 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

Among the things that seem to move commandingly towards 
an adequate world control at the present time are these : — 

(1) The increasing destructiveness and intolerahleness of 
war waged with the new powers of science. 

(2) The inevitable fusion of the world's economic affairs into 
one system, leading necessarily, it would seem, to some common 
control of currency, and demanding safe and uninterrupted 
communications, and a free movement of goods and people by 
sea and land throughout the whole world. The satisfaction of 
these needs will require a world control of very considerable 
authority and powers of enforcement. 

(3) The need, because of the increasing mobility of peoples, 
of effectual controls of health everywhere. 

(4) The urgent need of some equalization of labour condi- 
tions, and of the minimum standard of life throughout the 
world. This seems to carry with it, as a necessary corollary, 
the establishment of some minimum standard of education for 
everyone. 

(5) The impossibility of developing the enormous benefits 
of flying without a world control of the air-ways. 

The necessity and logic of such diverse considerations as 
these push the mind irresistibly, in spite of the clashes of race 
and tradition and the huge difficulties- created by differences in 
language, towards the belief that a conscious struggle to estab- 
lish or prevent a political world community will be the next 
stage in human history. The things that require that world 
community are permanent needs, one or other of these needs 
appeals to nearly everyone, and against their continuing per- 
sistence are only mortal difficulties, great no doubt, but mortal ; 
prejudices, passions, animosities, delusions about race and coun- 
try, egotisms, and such-like fluctuating and evanescent things, 
set up in men's minds by education and suggestion; none of 
them things that make now for the welfare and survival of the 
individuals who are under their sway nor of the states and 
towns and associations in which they prevail. 



The attainment of the world state may be impeded and may 
be opposed to-day by many apparently vast forces ; but it has, 
urging it on, a much more powerful force, that of the free and 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1093 

growing common intelligence of mankind. To-day there is 
in the world a small but increasing number of men, historians, 
archaeologists, ethnologists, economists, sociologists, psycholo- 
gists, educationists, and the like, who are doing for human in- 
stitutions that same task of creative analysis which the scientific 
men of the seventeenth and eighteenth century did for the 
materials and mechanism of human life; and just as these lat- 
ter, almost unaware of what they were doing, made telegraphy, 
swift transit on sea and land, flying and a thousand hitherto 
impossible things possible, so the former may be doing more 
than the world suspects, or than they themselves suspect, to 
clear up and make plain the thing to do and the way to do it, 
in the greater and more urgent human affairs. 

Let us ape Roge-r Bacon in his prophetic mood, and set down 
what we believe will be the broad fundamentals of the coming 
world state. 

(i) It will be based upon a common world religion, very 
much simplified and universalized and better understood. This 
will not be Christianity nor Islam nor Buddhism nor any such 
specialized form of religion, but religion itself pure and unde- 
filed ; the Eightfold Way, the Kingdom of Heaven, brotherhood, 
creative service, and self-forgetfulness. Throughout the world 
men's thoughts and motives will be turned by education, exam- 
ple, and the circle of ideas about them, from the obsession of 
self to the cheerful service of human knowledge, human power, 
and human unity. 

(ii) And this world state will be sustained by a universal 
education, organized upon a scale and of a penetration and 
quality beyond all present experience. The whole race, and 
not simply classes and peoples, will be educated. Most parents 
will have a technical knowledge of teaching. Quite apart 
from the duties of parentage, perhaps ten per cent, or more of 
the adult population will, at some time or other in their lives, 
bo workers in the world's educational organization. And 
education, as the new age will conceive it, will go on through- 
out life; it will not cease at any particular age. Men and 
women will simply become self-educators and individual stu- 
dents and student teachers as they grow older. 

(iii) There will be no armies, no navies, and no classes of 
unemployed people eitlier wealthy or poor. 

(iv) The world state's organization of scientific research 



1094 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

and record compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean 
liner beside the dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic 
wanderer. 

(v) There will be a vast free literature of criticism and 
discussion. 

(vi) The world's political organization will be democratic, 
that is to say, the government and direction of affairs will be 
in immediate touch with and responsive to the general thought 
of the educated whole population. 

(vii) Its economic organization will be an exploitation of 
all natural wealth and every fresh possibility science reveals, 
by the agents and servants of the common government for the 
common good. Private enterprise will be the servant — a useful, 
valued, and well-rewarded servant — and no longer the robber 
master of the commonweal. 

(viii) And this implies two achievements that seem very 
difficult to us to-day. They are matters of mechanism, but 
they are as essential to the world's well-being as it is to a sol- 
dier's, no matter how brave he may be, that his machine gun 
should not jam, and to an aeronaut's that his steering-gear should 
not fail him in mid-air. Political well-being demands that 
electoral methods shall be used, and economic well-being re- 
quires that a currency shall be used, safeguarded or proof 
against the contrivances and manipulations of clever, dishon- 
est men.^ 



There can be little question that the attainment of a federa- 
tion of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of 
social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality 
of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, 
would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to 
open a new phase in human history. The enormous waste 
caused by military preparation and the mutual annoyance of 
competing great powers, and the still more enormous waste due 
to the under-productivencss of great masses of people, either 
because they are too wealthy for stimulus or too poor for effi- 
ciency, would cease. There would be a vast increase in the 
supply of human necessities, a rise in the standard of life 
^ See Wells, The Salvaging of Civilization. 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1095 

and in what is considered a necessity, a development of transport 
and every kind of convenience ; and a multitude of people would 
be transferred from low-grade production to such higher work 
as art of all kinds, teaching, scientific research, and the like. 
All over the world there would be a setting free of human 
capacity, such as has occurred hitherto only in small places and 
throiigh precious limited phases of prosperity and security. 
Unless we are to suppose that spontaneous outbreaks of super- 
men have occurred in the past, it is reasonable to conclude 
that the Athens of Pericles, the Florence of the Medici, Eliza- 
bethan England, the great deeds of Asoka, the Tang and Ming 
periods in art, are but samples of what a whole world of sus- 
tained security would yield continuously and cumulatively. 
Without supposing any change in human quality, but merely 
its release from the present system of inordinate waste, history 
justifies this expectation. 

We have seen how, since the liberation of human thought in 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a comparatively few 
curious and intelligent men, chiefly in western Europe, have 
produced a vision of the world and a body of science that is now, 
on the material side, revolutionizing life. Mostly these men 
have worked against great discouragement, with insufficient 
funds and small help or support from the mass of mankind. 
It is impossible to believe that these men were the maximum 
intellectual harvest of their generation. England alone in the 
last three centuries must have produced scores of Newtons 
who never learnt to read, hundreds of Daltons, Darwins, Ba- 
cons, and Huxleys who died stunted in hovels, or never got a 
chance of proving their quality. All the world over, there must 
have been myriads of potential first-class investigators, splendid 
artists, creative minds, who never caught a gleam of inspiration 
or opportunity, for every one of that kind who has left his 
mark upon the world. In the trenches of the Western front 
alone during the late war thousands of potential great men died 
unfulfilled. But a world with something like a secure interna- 
tional peace and something like social justice, will fish for 
capacity vj'iih the fine net of universal education, and may ex- 
pect a yield beyond comparison greater than any yield of able 
and brilliant men that the world has known hitherto. 

It is such considerations as this indeed which justify the con- 
centration of eifort in the near future upon the making of a 



1096 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

new world state of righteousness out of our present confusions. 
War is a horrible thing, and constantly more horrible and 
dreadful, so that unless it is ended it will certainly end human 
society; social injustice, and the sight of the limited and cramped 
human beings it produces, torment the soul ; but the strongest 
incentive to constructive political and social work for an im- 
aginative spirit lies not so much in the mere hope of escaping 
evils as in the opportunity for great adventures that tlieir sup- 
pression will open to our race. We want to get rid of the mili- 
tarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is 
an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and 
blustering in our way to achievement. We want to abolish 
many extravagances of private ownership just as we should 
want to abolish some idiot guardian who refused us admission 
to a studio in which there were fine things to do. 

There are people who seem to imagine that a world order and 
one universal law of justice would end human adventure. It 
would but begin it. But instead of the adventure of the past, 
the "^'romance" of the cinematograph world, the perpetual reiter- 
ated harping upon the trite reactions of sex and combat and the 
hunt for gold, it would be an unending exploration upon the 
edge of experience. Hitherto man has been living in a slum, 
amidst quarrels, revenges, vanities, shames and taints, hot de- 
sires and urgent appetites. He has scarcely tasted sweet air 
yet and tbe great freedoms of the world that science has enlarged 
for him. 

To picture to ourselves something of the wider life that 
world unity would open to men is a very attractive speculation. 
Life will certainly go with a stronger pulse, it will breathe a 
deeper breath, because it will have dispelled and conquered a 
hundx^ed infections of body and mind that now reduce it to 
invalidism and squalor. We have already laid stress on the 
vast elimination of drudgery from human life through the crea- 
tion of a new race of slaves, the machines. This — and the dis- 
appearance of war and the smoothing out of endless restraints 
and contentions by juster social and economic arrangements — 
will lift the burthen of toilsome work and routine work, that 
has been the price of human security since the dawn of the first 
civilizations, from the shoulders of our children. Which does 
not mean that they will cease to work, but that they will cease to 
do irksome work under pressure, and will work freely, plan- 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1097 

ning, making, creating, according to their gifts and instincts. 
They will light nature no longer as dull conscripts of the pick 
and plough, but for a splendid conquest. Only the spiritless- 
ness of our present depression blinds us to the clear intima- 
tions of our reason that in tlie course of a few generations every 
little country town could become an Athens, every human being 
could be gentle in breeding and healthy in body and mind, the 
whole solid earth man's mine and its uttermost regions his 
playground. 

In this Outline we have sought to show two great systems 
of development interacting in the story of human society. We 
have seen, growing out of that later special neolithic culture, the 
heliolithic culture in the warmer alluvial parts of the world, 
the great primordial civilizations, fecund systems of subjuga- 
tion and obedience, vast multiplications of industrious and sub- 
servient men. We have shown the necessary relationship of 
these early civilizations to the early temples and to king-gods 
and god-kings. At the same time we have traced the develop- 
ment from a simpler neolithic level of the wanderer peoples, 
who became the nomadic peoples, in those great groups the 
Aryans and the Hun-]\Iongol peoples of the north-west and the 
north-east and (from a heliolithic phase) the Semites of the 
Arabian deserts. Our history has told of a repeated overrun- 
ning and refreshment of the originally brunet civilizations by 
these hardier, bolder, free-spirited jD^Poples of the steppes and 
desert. We have pointed out how these constantly recurring 
nomadic injections have steadily altered the primordial civiliza- 
tions both in blood and in spirit ; and how the world religions 
of to-day, and what we now call democracy, the boldness of 
modern scientific inquiry and a universal restlessness, are due 
to this "nomadization" of civilization. The old civilizations 
created tradition, and lived by tradition. To-day the power of 
tradition is destroyed. The body of our state is civilization 
still, but its spirit is the spirit of the nomadic world. It is the 
spirit of the great plains and the high seas. 

So that it is difficult to resist the persuasion that so soon 
as one law runs in the earth and the fierceness of frontiers 
ceases to distress us, that urgency in our nature that stirs 
us in spring and autumn to be up and travelling, will have 
its way with us. We shall obey the call of the sununer pastures 
and the winter pastures in our blood, the call of the mountains, 



1098 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

the desert, and the sea. For some of us also, who may be of a 
different lineage, there is the call of the forest, and there are 
those who wonld hunt in the summer and return to the fields for 
the harvest and the plough. But this does not mean that men 
will have become homeless and all adrift. The normal nomadic 
life is not a homeless one, but a movement between homes. 
The Kalmucks to-day, like the swallows, go yearly a thousand 
miles from one home to another. The beautiful and convenient 
cities of the coming age, we conclude, will have their seasons 
when they will be full of life, and seasons when they will seem 
asleep. Life will ebb and flow to and from every region sea- 
sonally as the interest of that region rises or declines. 

There will be little drudgery in this better-ordered world. 
Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general 
drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service 
and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it willnot 
consume nor degTadc the whole life of anyone. And not only 
drudges, but many other sorts of men and ways of living which 
loom large in the current social scheme will necessarily have 
dwindled in importance or passed away altogether. There will 
be few professional fighting men or none at all, no custom- 
house officers; the increased multitude of teachers will have 
abolished large police forces and large jail staffs, mad-houses 
will be rare or non-existent; a world-wide sanitation will have 
diminished the proportion of hospitals, nurses, sick-room at- 
tendants, and the like ; a world-wide economic justice, the float- 
ing population of cheats, sharpers, gamblers, forestallers, para- 
sites, and speculators generally. Ijut there will be no diminu- 
tion of adventure or romance in this world of the days to come. 
Sea fisheries and the incessant insurrection of the sea, for 
example, will call for their own stalwart types of men ; the 
high air will clamour for manhood, the deep and dangerous 
secret places of nature. Men will turn again with renewed 
interest to the animal world. In these disordered days a stupid, 
uncontrollable massacre of animal species goes on— from cer- 
tain angles of vision it is a thing almost more tragic than human 
miseries ; in the nineteenth century dozens of animal species, 
and some of them very interesting species, were exterminated ; 
but one of the first fruits of an effective world state would be 
the better protection of what are now wild beasts. It is a 
strange thing in human history to note how little has been done 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY 1099 

since the Bronze Age in taming, using, befriending, and ap- 
preciating the animal life abont us. But that mere witless 
killing which is called sport to-day would inevitably give 
place in a better educated world community to a modification 
of the primitive instincts that find expression in this way, 
changing them into an interest not in the deaths, but in the 
lives of beasts, and leading to fresh and perhaps very strange 
and beautiful attempts to befriend these pathetic, kindred 
lower creatures we no longer fear as enemies, hate as rivals, or 
need as slaves. And a world state and universal justice does 
not mean the imprisonment of our race in any bleak institu- 
tional orderliness. There will still be mountains and the sea, 
there will be jungles and great forests, cared for indeed and 
treasured and protected ; the great plains will still spread be- 
fore us and the wild winds blow. But men will not hate so 
much, fear so much, nor cheat so desperately — and they will 
keep their minds and bodies cleaner. 

There are unhopeful prophets who see in the gathering to- 
gether of men into one community the possibility of violent 
race conflicts, conflicts for "ascendancy," but that is to suppose 
that civilizati(/n is incapable of adjustments by which men of 
difl^erent qualities and temperaments and appearances will live 
side by side, following difterent roles and contributing diverse 
gifts. The weaving of mankind into one community does not 
imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the 
reverse; the welcome and the adequate utilization of distinctive 
quality in an atmosphere of understanding. It is the almost 
universal bad manners of the present age which make race in- 
tolerable to race. The community to which we may be mov- 
ing will be more mixed — which does not necessarily mean 
more interbred — more various and more interesting than any 
existing community. Communities all to one pattern, like boxes 
of toy soldiers, are things of the past rather than the future. 

But one of the hardest, most impossible tasks a writer can 
set himself, is to picture the life of people l^etter educated, 
happier in their circumstances, more free and more healthy 
than he is himself. We know enough to-day to know that there 
is infinite room for betterment in every human concern. Noth- 
ing is needed but collective effort. Our poverty, our restraints, 
our infections and indigestions, our quarrels and misunder- 
standings, are all things controllable and removable by con- 



1100 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

certed human action, but we know as little bow life would feel 
witbout tbeni as some poor dirty ill-treated, fieree-souled crea- 
ture born and bred amidst the cruel and dingy surroundings 
of a European back street can know what it is to bathe every 
day, always to be clad beautifully, to climb mountains for 
pleasure, to fly, to meet none but agreeable, well-mannered 
people, to conduct researches or make delightful things. Yet 
a time when all such good things will be for all men may be 
coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes 
that brings the good time nearer ; each heart that fails delays it. 

One cannot foretell the surprises or disappointments the 
future has in store. Before this chapter of the World State 
can begin fairly in our histories, other chapters as yet unsus- 
pected may still need to be written, as long and as full of con- 
flict as our account of the growth and rivalries of the Great 
Powers. There may be tragic economic struggles, grim grap- 
plings of race with race and class with class. It may be that 
"private enterprise" will refuse to learn the lesson of service 
without some quite catastrophic revolution, and that a phase of 
confiscation and amateurish socialistic government lies before 
us. We do not know; we cannot tell. These are unnecessary 
disasters, but they may be unavoidable disasters. Human his- 
tory becomes more and more a race between education and 
catastrophe. Against the unifying effort of Christendom and 
against the unifying influence of the mechanical revolution, 
catastrophe won — at least to the extent of achieving the Great 
War. We cannot tell yet how much of the winnings of catas- 
trophe still remain to be gathered in. New falsities may arise 
and hold men in some unrighteous and fated scheme of order 
for a time, before they collapse amidst the misery and slaugh- 
ter of generations. 

Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses 
and will progress. In this Outline, in our account of pafe- 
olithic men, we have borrowed a description from Mr. Worth- 
ing-ton Smith of the very highest life in the world some fifty 
thousand years ago. It was a bestial life. We have sketched, 
toO', the gathering for a human sacrifice, some fifteen thousand 
years ago. That scene again is almost incredibly cruel to a 
modern civilized reader. 

Yet it is not more than five hundred years since the gTeat 
empire of the Aztecs still believed that it could live only by the 



THE NEXT STAGE OF HISTORY llOl 

shedding' of blood. Every year in Mexico hundreds of human 
victims died in this fashion : the body was bent like a bow over 
the curved stone of sacrifice, the breast was shished open with 
a knife of obsidian, and the priest tore out the beating heart 
of the still living victim. The day may be close at hand when 
we shall no longer tear out the hearts of men, even for the 
sake of our national gods. Let the reader but refer to the 
earlier time charts we have given in this history, and he will 
see the true measure and transitoriness of all the conflicts, 
deprivations, and miseries of this present period of painful 
and yet hopeful change. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

TO conclude this Outline, we give here a Table of Leading 
Events from the year 800 b.c. to 1920 a,d. Following 
that we give five time diagrams covering the period 
from 1000 b.c. onward, which present the trend of events in 
a gi'aphic form. 

It is well that the reader should keep in mind an idea of 
the true proportions of historical to geological time. The scale 
of the five diagrams at the end is such that by it the time dia- 
gram on page 142 would be about 8V2 times as long, that is to 
say about 4 feet ; that on page 47 showing the interval since 
the Eoliths, 555 feet, and that on page 11 representing the 
whole of geological time would be somewhere between 12 and, 
at the longest and most probable estimate, 2G0 miles! Let the 
reader therefore take one of these chronological tables we" give, 
and imagine it extended upon a long strip of paper to a distance 
of 55 feet. He would have to get up and walk al)out that 
distance to note the date of the painting of the Altamira caves, 
and he woukl have to go ten times that distance by the side 
of the same narrow strip to reach the earlier Neanderthalers. 
A mile or so from home, but probably much further away, the 
strip might be recording the last of the dinosaurs. And this 
on a scale which represents the time from Columbus to ourselves 
by three inches of space ! 

Chronology only begins to be precise enough to specify the 
exact year of any event after the establishment of the eras of 
the First Olympiad and the building of Rome. 

About the year 1000 b.c. the Aryan peoples were establishing 
themselves in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and the Balkans, 
and they were established in North India. Cnossos was already 
destroyed, and the spacious times of Egypt, of Thotmes III, 
Amenophis III, and Ranieses II were three or four centuries 
away. Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynast^' were ruling 
in the Nile Valley. Israel was united under her early kings; 
1102 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1103 

Saul or David or possibly even Solomon may liavo been veh^n- 
ing. Sargon I (2750 b.c. of the Akkadian Sumerian Empire 
was a remote memory in Babylonian history, more remote than 
is Constantine the Great from the world of the present day. 
Hammurabi had been dead a thousand years. The Assyrians 
were already dominating the less military Babylonians. In 
1100 B.C. Tiglath Pileser I had taken Babylon. But there 
was no permanent conquest; Assyria and Babylonia were still 
separate empires. In China the new Chow dynasty was flour- 
ishing. Stonehenge in England was already a thousand years 
old. 

The next two centuries saw a renascence of Egypt under the 
XXII Dynasty, the splitting up of the brief little Hebrew 
kindgom of Solomon, the spreading of the Greeks in the Bal- 
kans, South Italy and Asia Minor, and the days of Etruscan 
predominance in Central ItrJyo We may begin our list of 
ascertainable dates with 

B.C. 

800. The building of Carthage. 

TOO. The Ethiopian conquest of Eg}'pt (founding the XXVth 
Dynasty). 

776. First Olympiad. 

753. Kome built. 

745. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylonia and founded 
the New Assyrian Empire. 

738. Menahem, king of Israel, lx)ught oif Tiglath Bik'ser III. 

735. Greeks settling in Sicily. 

722. Sargon II armed the Assyrians with iron weapons. 

721. He deported the Israelites. 

704. Sennacherib. 

701. Ilis army destroyed by a pestilence on its way to Egypt. 

680. Esarhaddon took Thebes in Egypt (overthrowing the 
Ethiopian XXVth Dynasty). 

667. Sardanapalus. 

664. Psammetichus I restored the freedom of Egypt and 
founded the XXVIth Dynasty (to 610). He was as- 
sisted against Assyria by Lydian troops sent by Gyges. 

608. Xecho of Egypt defeated Josiah, king of Judali, at the 
Battle of Megiddo. 

606. Capture of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes. Foun- 
dation of the Chaldean Empire. 



1104 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

B.C. 

604. Necho pushed to the Euphrates and was overthrown l>y 
JS'ebuehadnezzar II. Josiah fell with him. 

586. Nebuchadnezzar carried olf the Jews to Babylon. Many 
fled to Egypt and settled there. 

550. Cyrus the Persian succeeded Cyaxares the Mede. 
Cyrus conquered (^roesus. 

Buddha lived about this time. So also did Confucius 
and Lao Tse. 

539. Cyrus took Babylon and founded the Persian Empire. 

527. Peisistratus died. 

525. Cambyses conquered Egypt. 

521. Darius I, the son of Hystas2>es, ruled from the Helles- 
pont to the Indus. 
His expedition to Scythia. 

490. Battle of Marathon. 

484. Herodotus born. ^Eschylus won his first prize for 
tragedy. 

480. Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. 

479. The Battles of Plata-a and Mycale completed the re- 
pulse of Persia. 

474. Etruscan fleet destroyed by the Sicilian Greeks. 

470. Voyage of Hanno. 

466. Pericles. 

465. Xerxes murdered. 

438. Herodotus recited his History in Athens. 

431. Pelojx)nncsian War began (to 404). 

428. Pericles died. Herodotus died. 

427. Aristophanes began his career. Plato born. He lived 
to 347. 

401. Eetreat of the Ten Thousand. 

390. Brenuus sacked Pome. 

366. Camillus built the Temple of C'Oncord. 

359. Philip became king of Macedonia. 

338. Battle of Chaeroni'a. 

336. Macedonian troops crossed into Asia, Philip nuirdered. 

334. Battle of the Granicus. 

333. Battle of Issus. 

332. Alexander in Egypt. 

331. Battle of Arbela." 

330. Darius III killed. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 110r> 

B.C. 

i}23. Death of Alexander the Great. 

321. Kise of Cliaudragiipta in the runjab. The Romans 

completely beaten by the Samnites at the battle of the 

Caiidine Forks. 
303. Chandragiipta repulsed Seleucus. 
285. Ptolemy Soter died. 
281. Pyrrhus invaded Italy. 
280. Battle of Heraclea. 
279. Battle of Aiisciihim. 

278. Gauls' raid into Asia Minor and settlement in Galatia. 
275. Pyrrhus left Italy. 
264. First Punic War. (Asoka began to reign in Behar — 

to 227.) First gladiatorial games in Pome. 
260. Battle of Mylee. 
256. Battle of Ecnomus. 
246. Shi Hwang-ti became king of Ch'in. 
242. Battle of J^]gatian Isles. 
241. End of First Punic War. 

225. Battle of Telamon. Roman armies in Illyria. 
220. Shi Hwang-ti became emperor of China. 

[Note that the date given to Shi Hwang-ti in the dia- 

gi-am on p. 142 is incorrect.] 
219. Second Punic War. 
216. Battle of Cannae. 
214. Great Wall of China begim. 
210. Death of Shi Hwang-ti. 
202. Battle of Zama. 
201. End of Second Punic War. 
200-197. Rome at war with j\Iacedonia. 
192. War with the Seleucids. 
190. Battle of Magnesia. 
149. Third Punic War. (The Yueh-Chi came into Western 

Turkestan.) 
146. Carthage destroyed. Corinth destroyed. 
133. Attains" bequeathed Pergamum to Rome. Tiberius Grac 

chus killed. 
121. Caius Gracchus killed. . 
118. War with Jugurtha. 
106. War with Jugurtha ended. 
102. Marius drove back Germans. 



HOG THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

B.C. 

100. Triumph of Marius. (Wu-ti conquering the Tarim 
valley.) 
91. Social war. 

89. All Italians became Eoman citizens. 
86. Death of Marius. 
78. Death of Sulla. 

73. The revolt of the slaves under Spartacus. 
71. Defeat and end of Spartacus. 
QQ. Pompey led Eoman troops to the Caspian and Euphrates. 

He encountered the Alani. 
64. Mithridates of Pontus died. 
53. Crassus killed at Carrhse. Mongolian elements with 

Parthians. 
48. Julius Ca?sar defeated Pompey at Pharsalos. 
44. Julius Caesar assassinated. 
31. Battle of Actium. 

27. Augustus Cnesar princeps (until 14 a.d.). 
4. True date of birth of Jesus of Nazareth. 
A.D. Christian Era began. 
6. Province of Mcesia established. 

9. Province of Pannonia established. Imperial boundary 
carried to the Danube. 
14. Augustus died. Tiberius emperor. 
30. Jesus of Nazareth crucified. 
37. Caligula succeeded Tiberius. 

41. Claudius (the first emperor of the legions) made em- 
peror by pretorian guard after murder of Calig- 
ula. 
54. Nero succeeded Claudius. 
61. Boadicea massacred Roman garrison in Britain. 

68. Suicide of Nero. (Galba, Otho, Vitellus, emperors in 

succession. ) 

69. Vespasian began the so-called Flavian dynasty. 
79. Titus succeeded Vespasian, 

81. Domitian. 
84. North Britain annexed. 

96. Nerva began the so-called dynasty of the Antonines. 
98. Trajan succeeded Nerva. 
102. Pan Chau on the Caspian Sea. (Indo-Scythians in- 
vading North India.) 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1107 

A.D. 

117. Hadrian succeeded Trajan. Roman Empire at its 

greatest extent. 
138. Antoninus Pius succeeded Hadrian. (The Indo-Scy- 

tliians at this time were destroying the last traces of 

Hellenic rule in India.) 
150. [About this time Kanishka reigned in India, Ivashgar, 

Yarkand, and Kotan.] 
161. Marcus Aurelius succeeded Antoninus Pius. 
164. Great plagTie began, and lasted to the death of M. 

Aurelius (180). This also devastated all Asia. 
180. Death of Marcus Aurelius. 

(Nearly a century of war and disorder began in the 

Roman Empire.) 
220. End of the Han dynasty. Beginning of four hundred 

years of division in China. 
227. Ardashir I (first Sassanid shah) put an end to Arsacid 

line in Persia. 
242. Maui began his teaching. 
247. Goths crossed Danube in a great raid. 
251. Great victory of Goths. Emperor Decius killed. 
260. Sapor I, the second Sassanid shah, took Antioch, cap- 
tured the Emperor Valerian, and was cut up on his 

return from Asia Minor by Odenathus of Palmyra. 

269. The Emperor Claudius defeated the Goths at Nish. 

270. Aurolian became emperor. 

272. Zenobia carried captive to Rome. End of the brief 
glories of Palmyra. 

275. Probus succeeded Aurelian. 

276. Goths in Pontus. The Emperor Probus forced back 

Franks and Alemanni. 

277. Mani crucified in Persia. 
284. Diocletian became emperor. 

303. Diocletian persecuted the Christians. 

311. Galerius abandoned the persecution of the Christians. 

312. Constantino the Great became emperor. 

313. Constantine presided over a Christian Council at Aries. 
321. Fresh Gothic raids driven back. 

323. Constantine presided over the Council of Nicsca. 
337. Vandals driven by Goths obtained leave to settle in 
Pannonia. 



1108 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D. 

337, Constantine baptized on his death-lKid. 

354. St. Augustine born. 

361-3. Julian the Apostate attempted to substitute Mithraism 

for Christianity. 
379. Theodosius the Great (a Spaniard) emperor. 
390. The statute of Serapis at Alexandria broken up. 
392. Theodosius the Great emperor of east and west. 
395. Theodosius the Great died. Honorius and Arcadius 

redivided the empire with Stilicho and Alaric as 

their masters and protectors. 
410. The Visigoths under Alaric captured Eome. 
425. Vandals settling in south of Spain. Huns in Pannonia, 

Goths in Dalmatia. Visigoths and Suevi in Portugal 

and North Spain. English invading Britain. 
429. Vandals under Genseric invaded Africa. 
439. Vandals took Carthage. 
448. Priscus visited Attila. 
451. Attila raided Gaul and was defeated by Franks, Ale- 

manni, and Komans at Troyes. 
453. Death of Attila. 
455. Vandals sacked Pome. 
470. Ephthalites' raid into India. 
476. Odoacer, king of a medley of Teutonic tribes, informed 

Constantinople that there was no emperor in the West. 

End of the Western Empire. 

480. St. Benedict born. 

481. Clovis in France. The Merovingians. 

483. Nestor ian church broke away from the Orthodox Chris- 
tian church. 

493. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, conquered Italy and became 
King of Italy, but was nominally subject to Constan- 
tinople. 

(Gothic kings in Italy. Goths settled on special con- 
fiscated lands as a garrison.) 

527. Justinian emperor. 

528. Mihirag-ula, the (Ephthalite) Attila of India, over- 

thrown. 

529. Justinian closed the schools at Athens, which had flour- 

ished nearly a thousand years. Belisarius (Justinian's 
general) took Naples. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1109 

A.D. 

531. Chosroes I began to reign. 

543. Great plague in Constantinople. 

544. St. Benedict died. 

553. Goths expelled from Italy by Jnstinian. Cassiodorns 

founded his monastery. 
565. Jnstinian died. The Lombards eonqnered most of 

North Italy (leaving liavenna and Kcmio I^yzantine). 

The Tnrks broke np the Ephthalites in Western Tnrke- 

stan. 
570. Mnhanmiad born. 
579. Chosroes I died. 

(The Lombards dominant in Italy.) 
590. I*lagne raged in Kome. (Gregory the Great — Gregory 

I — and the vision of St. Angelo.) Chosroes II began 

to reign. 
()10. Heraclins began to reign. 
G19. Chosroes II held Egypt, Jenisalem, Damascus, and had 

armies on Hellespont. Tang dynasty began in China. 

622. The Ilegira. 

623. Battle of Badr. 

627. Great Persian defeat at Nineveh by Heraclins. The 

Meccan Allies besieged Medina. Tai Tsung became 
Emperor of China. 

628. Kavadh II mnrdered and succeeded his father, Chos- 

roes II. 
Mnhannnad wrote letters to all the rulers of the earth. 

629. Yuan Chwang started for India. Muhammad entered 

Mecca. 
632. Muhammad died. Abu Bekr Caliph. 

634. Battle of the Yarmuk. Moslems took Syria. Omar 

second Caliph. 

635. Tai Tsung received Nestorian missionaries. 

637. Battle of Kadessia. 

638. Jerusalem surrendered to Omar. 

642. Heraclins died. 

643. Othman third Caliph. 

645. Yuan Chwang returned to Singan. 

655. Defeat of the Byzantine fleet by the Moslems. 

656. Othman murdered at Medina. 
661. Ali murdered. 



1110 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D. 

662. Moawija Caliph. (First of the Omayyad caliphs.) 
668. The Caliph Moawiya attacked Constantinople by sea — 

Theodore of Tarsus became Archbishop of Canterbury. 
675. Last of the sea attacks by Moawiya on Constantinople. 
687. Pepin of Hersthal, mayor of the palace, reunited Aus- 

trasia and I^eustria. 
711. Moslem army invaded Spain from Africa. 

714. Charles Martel, mayor of the palace. 

715. The domains of the Caliph Walid I extended from the 

Pyrenees to China. 

717-18. Suleiman, son and successor of Walid, failed to take 
Constantinople. The Omayyad line passed its climax. 

732. Charles Martel defeated the Moslems near Poitiers. 

735. Death of the Venerable Bede. 

743. Walid II Caliph — the unbelieving Caliph. 

749. Overthrow of the Omayyads. Abdul Abbas, the first 
Abbasid Caliph. Spain remained Omayyad. Begin- 
ning of the break-up of the Arab Empire. 

751. Pepin crowned King of the French. 

755. Martyrdom of St. Boniface. 

768. Pepin died. 

771. Charlemagne sole king. 

774. Charlemagne conquered Lombardy. 

776. Charlemagne in Dalmatia. 

786. Haroun-ai-Raschid Abbasid Caliph in Bagdad (to 809). 

795. Leo III became Pope (to 816). 

800. Leo crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West. 

802. Egbert, formerly an English refugee at the court of 
Charlemagne, established himself as King of Wessex. 

810. Krum of Bulgaria defeated and killed the Emperor 
Nicephorus. 

814. Charlemagne died, Louis the Pious succeeds him. 

828. Egbert became first King of England. 

843. Louis the Pious died, and the Carlovingian Empire 
went to pieces. Until 962 there was no regular suc- 
cession of Holy Roman Emperors, though the title 
.appeared intermittently. 

850. About this time Purik (a Northman) became ruler of 
Novgorod and Kieff. 

852. Boris first Christian King of Bulgaria (to 884). 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1111 

A.D. 

805. The fleet of the Kussiaiis (Northmen) threatened Con- 
stantinople, 

886. The Treaty of Alfred of England and Gnthrum the 
Dane, establishing the Danes in the Danelaw. 

904. Russian (Northmen) fleet off Constantinople. 

912. Ivolf the Ganger established himself in Normandy. 

919. Ileury the Fowler elected King of Germany. 

928. Marozia imprisoned Pope John X. 

931. John XI Pope (to 930). 

936. Otto I became King of Germany in succession to his 
father, Henry the Fowler. 

941. Russian fleet again threatened Constantinople. 

955. John XII Pope. 

960. Northern Sung Dynasty began in China. 

962. Otto I, King of Germany, crowned Emperor (first 

Saxon Emperor) by John XII. 

963. Otto deposed John XII. 

969. Separate Fatimite Caliphate set up in Egypt. 

973. Otto II. 

983. Otto III. 

987. Hugh Capet became King of France. End of the 
Carlovingian line of French kings. 
1016. Canute became King of England, Denmark, and 

Norway. 
1037. Avicenna of Bokhara, the Prince of Physicians, died. 
1043. Russian fleet threatened Constantinople. 
1066. Conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy. 
1071. Revival of Islam under the Seljuk Turks. ]3attle of 

Melasgird. 
1073. Hildebrand became Pope (Gregory VII) to 1085. 
1082. Robert Guiscard captured Durazzo. 
1084. Robert Guiscard sacked Rome. 
1087-99. Urban II Pope. 

1094. Pestilence. 

1095. Urban II at Clermont summoned the First Crusade. 

1096. Massacre of the People s Crusade. 

1099. Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem. Paschal II 

Pope (to 1118). 
1138. Kin Empire flourished. The Sung capital shifted from 

Nanking to Hang Chau. 



1112 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D. 

1147. The Second Crusade. Foundation of the Christian 
Kingdom of Portugal. 

1169. Saladin Sultan of Egypt. 

1176. Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged supremacy of the 
Pope (Alexander III) at Venice. 

1187. Saladin captured Jerusalem. 

1189. The Third Crusade. 

1198. Averroes of Cordoba, the Arab philosopher, died. Inno- 
cent III Pope (to 1216). Frederick II (aged four). 
King of Sicily, became his ward. 

1202. The Fourth Crusade attacked the Eastern Empire. 

1204. Capture of Constantinople by the Latins. 

1206. Kutub founded Moslem state at Delhi. 

1212. The Children's Crusnde. 

1214. Jengis Khan took Peking. 

1215. Magna Carta signed. 

1216. Honorius III Pope. 

1218. Jengis Khan invaded Kharismia. 

1221. Failure and return of the Fifth Crusade. St. Dominic 
died (the Dominicans), 

1226. St. Francis of Assisi died. (The Franciscans.) 

1227. Jengis Khan died. Khan from the Caspian to the Pacific, 

and was succeeded by Ogdai Khan. 
Gregory IX Pope. 

1228. Frederick II embarked upon the Sixth Crusade, and 

acquired Jerusalem. 
1234. Mongols completed conquest of the Kin Empire with 
the help of the Sung Empire. 

1239. Frederick H excommunicated for the second time. 

1240. Mongols destroyed KiefF. Russia tributary to the 

Mongols. 

1241. Mongol victory at Liegnitz in Silesia. 

1244. The Egyptian Sultan recaptured Jerusalem. This led 

to the Seventh Crusade. 

1245. Frederick II re-excommunicatcd. The men of Schwyz 

burnt the castle of New Ilabsburg. 
1250, St. Louis of France ransomed. Frederick II, the last 
Hohenstaufen Emperor, died. German interregnum 
until 1273. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE ills 

A.D. 

1251. Maugu Khaii became Great Kbaii. Kublai Kban gov- 
ernor of Cbiiia. 
1258. lliilagii Khan took and destroyed Bagdad. 

1260. Kublai Kban became Great Khan. Ketboga defeated 

in Palestine. 

1261. The Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latins. 
1269. Kublai Khan sent a message of inquiry to the Pope by 

the older Polos. 
1271. Marco Polo started upon bis travels. 
1273. Kudolf of Ilabsburg elected Emperor. The Swiss 

formed their Everlasting League. 
1280. Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty in China. 

1292. Death of Kublai Khan. 

1293. Roger Bacon, the prophet of experimental science, died. 
1291. Boniface VIII Pope (to 1303). 

1295. Marco Polo returned to Venice. 

1303. Death of Pope Boniface VIII after the outrage of 

Anagni by Guillaume de Nogaret. 

1305. Clement V Pope. The papal court set up at Avignon. 

1308. Duns Scotus died. 

1318. Four Franciscans burnt for heresy at Marseilles. 

1347. Occam died. 

1348. The Great Plagiie, the Black Death. 
1358. The Jacquerie in France. 

1360. In China the Mongol (Yuan) Dynasty fell, and was 

succeeded by the Ming Dynasty (to 1644). 
1367. Timurlane assumed the title of Great Khan. 

1377. Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome. 

1378. The Great" Schism. Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII 

at Avignon. 
1381. Peasant revolt in England. Wat Tyler murdered in 

the presence of King Richard II. 
1384. Wyclifte died. 

1398. Huss preached AVycliffism at Prague. 
1405. Death of Timurlane. 

1414-18. The Council of Constance. Huss burnt (1415). 
1417. The Great Schism ended, Martin V Pope. 
1420. The Hussites revolted. Martin V preached a crusade 

against them. 



1114 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D. 

1431. The Catholic Crusaders dissolved before the Hussites at 

Domazlice. The Council of Basle met. 
1430. The Hussites came to terms with the church. 
113!). Council of Basle created a fresh schism iu the church. 
1445. Discovery of Cape Verde by the PortugTiese. 
1440. First printed hooks (Coster in Haarlem). 
1440. End of the Council of Basle. 

1453. Ottoman Turks under Muhammad II took Constanti- 
nople. 
14S0. Ivan III, Grand-duke of Moscow, threw oil" the Mongol 

allegiance. 
1481. Death of the Sultan iMuhammad II while preparing 

for the conquest of Italy. Bayazid II Turkish Sultan 

(to 1512). 
1480. Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. 

1492. Columbus cr(;ssed the Atlantic to America. Rodrigo 

Borgia, Alexander VI, Pope (to 1503). 

1493. Maximilian I became Emperor. 

1498. Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape to India. 

1499. Switzerland became an independent republic. 

1500. Charles V born. 

1509. Henry VIII King of England. 

1512. Selim Sultan (to 1520). lie bought the title of Caliph. 

Fall of Soderini (and Machiavelli) in Florence. 

1513. Leo X Pope. 

]515. Francis I King of France. 

1517. Selim annexed Egypt. Luther propounded his theses 
at Wittenberg. 

1510. Leonardo da Vinci died. Magellan's expedition started 

to sail round the world. Cortez entered Mexico city. 

1520. Suleiman the jMaguificent, Sultan (to 1500), who ruled 

from Bagdad to Hungary. Charles V Emperor. 

1521. Luther at the Diet of Worms. Loyola wounded at 

Pampeluna. 
1525. Baber won the battle of Panipat, captured Delhi, and 

founded the Mogul Empire. 
1527. The German troops in Italy, under the Constable of 

Bourbon, took and pillaged Eome. 
1529. Suleiman besieged Vienna. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE lli5 

A.D. 

1580, Pizarro invaded Peru. Charles V crowned by the 
Pope. Henry VIII began his quarrel with the 
Papacy. 

1532. The Anabaptists seized Miinster. 

1535. Fall of the Anabaptist rule in jVIiinster. 

1539. The Company of Jesus founded. 

1543. Copernicus died. 

1545. The Council of Trent (to 1503) assembled to put the 

church in order. 

1546. Martin Luther died. 

1547. Ivan IV (the Terrible) took the title of Tsar of Rus- 

sia. Francis I died. 

1549. First Jesuit missions arrived in South America. 

1552. Treaty of Passau. Temporary pacification of Ger- 
many. 

1556. Charles V abdicated. Akbar Great Mogid (to 1605). 
Ignatius of Loyola died. 

1558. Death of Charles V. 

1563. End of the Council of Trent and the reform of the 

Catholic Church. 

1564. Galileo born. 

1566. Suleiman the Magnificent died. 

1567. Eevolt of the Netherlands. 

1568. Execution of Counts Egmont and Horn. 
1571. Kepler born. 

1573. Siege of Alkmaar. 

1578. Harvey born. 

1583. Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition to Virginia. 

1601. Tycho Brahe died. 

1603. James I King of England and Scotland. Dr. Gilbert 
died. 

1605. Jehangir Great Mogul. 

1606. Virginia Ccmipany founded. 
1609. Holland independent. 
1618. Thirty Years' War began. 

1620. Mayflower expedition founded New Plymouth. First 
negro slaves landed at Jamestown (Va.). 

1625. Charles I of England. ' 

1626. Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Venilam) died. 



1116 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D. 

1628. Shah Jehaii Great Moo-ul. The English Petition of 

Rigid. 

1629. Charles I of England began his eleven years of rule 

without a parliament. 

1630. Kepler died. 

1632. Leeuwenhoek born. Gnstavns Adolphus killed at the 

Battle of Liitzen. 

1634. Wallenstein murdered. 

1638. Japan closed to Euro|)eans (until 18(35). 

1640. Charles I of England summoned the Long Parliament. 

1641. Massacre of the English in Ireland. 

1642. Galileo died. Newton born. 

1643. Louis XIV began his reign of seventy-two years. 

1644. The Manchus ended the Ming dynasty. 

1645. Swine pens in the inner town of Leipzig pulled down. 

1648. Treaty of Westphalia. Thereby Holland and Switzer- 

land were recognized as free republics and Prussia 
became important. The treaiy gave a complete vic- 
tory neither to the Imperial Crown nor to the Princes. 
War of the Fronde; it ended in the complete vic- 
tory of the French crown. 

1649. Execution of Charles I of England. 

1658. Aurungzeb Great IMogiil. Cromwell died. 

1660. Charles II of England. 

1674. Nieuw Amsterdam finally became British by treaty and 

was renamed I^ew York. 
1683. The last Turkish attack on Vienna defea.ted by -John 

III of Poland. 

1688. The British Revolution. Flight of James II. William 

and Mary began to reigii. 

1689. Peter the Great of Russia. (To 1725.) 

1690. Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. 
1694. Voltaire born. 

1701. Frederick I first King of Prussia. 

1704. John Locke, the father of modern democratic theory, 

died. 
1707. Death of Aurungzeb. The empire of the Great Mogul 

disintegrated. 

1713. Frederick the Great of Prussia born. 

1714. George I of Britain. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE III7 

A.D. 

1715. Louis XV of France. 
1727. ]S^ewton died. George II of IJritain. 
1732. Oglethorpe founded Georgia. 

1736. Xadir Shah raided India. (The heginning of twenty 
years of raiding and disorder in India.) 

1740. Maria-Theresa began to reign. (Being a woman, she 

could not be empress. Her husband, Francis I, was 
emperor until his death in 1765, when her son, Joseph 
II, succeeded him.) 
Accession of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. 

1741. The Empress Elizabeth of Eussia began to reign. 
1755-63. Britain and France struggled for America and India. 

France in alliance with Austria and Russia against 
Prussia and Britain (1756-63) ; the Seven Years' 
War. 
1757. Battle of Plassey. 

1759. The British general, Wolfe, took Quebec. 

1760. George III of Britain. 

1762. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia died. Murder of the 

Tsar Paul, and accession of Catherine the Great of 
Russia (to 1796). 

1763. Peace of Paris; Canada ceded to Britain. British 

dominant in India. 

1764. Battle of Buxar. 

1769. Napoleon Bonaparte born. 

1774. Louis XVI began his reign. Suicide of Clive. The 

American revolutionary drama began. 

1775. Battle of Lexington. 

1776. Declaration of Independence by the United States of 

America. 

1778. J. J. Rousseau, the creator of modern democratic senti- 
ment, died. 

1780. End of the reign of Maria-Theresa. The Emperor 
Joseph (1765 to 1790) succeeded her in the hereditary 
Habsburg dominions. 

1783. Treaty of Peace between Britain and the new United 
States of America. Quaco set free in Massachu- 
setts. 

1787. The Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia set up 
the Federal Government of the United States. France 



1118 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D, 

discovered to be bankrupt. The Assembly of the 
Notables. 

1788. First Federal Congress of the United States at New 

York. 

1789. The French States-General assembled. Storming of 

the Bastille. 

1791. The Jacobin Kevohition. Flight to Varennes. 

1792. France declared war on Austria. Prussia declared war 

on France. Battle of Valmy. France became a 
republic. 

179-3. Louis XVI beheaded. 

179-4. Execution of Robespierre and end of the Jacobin re- 
public. Eule of the Convention. 

1795. The Directory. Bonaparte suppressed a revolt and went 
to Italy as commander-in-chief. 

1797. By the Peace of Campo Formio Bonaparte destroyed 

the Republic of Venice. 

1798. Bonaparte went to Egypt. Battle of the Nile. 

1799. Bonaparte returned. He became First Consul with 

enormous powers. 

1800. Legislative union of Ireland and Enoland enacted Jan- 

uary 1st, 1801. 

Napoleon's campaign against Austria. Battles of 
Marengo (in Italy) and ITohenlindcn (]\Ioreau's 
victory). 

1801. Preliminaries of peace between France, England, and 

Austria signed. 

1803. Bonaparte occupied Switzerland, and so precipitated 

war. 

1804. Bonaparte became Emperor. Francis TI took the title 

of Emperor of Austria in 1805, and in 1806 he 
dropped the title of Holy Roman Emperor. So the 
"Holy Roman Empire" came to an end. 

1805. Battle of Trafalgar. Battles of Ulm and Austerlitz. 

1806. Prussia overthrown at Jena. 

1807. Battles of Eylau and Friedland and Troatv of Tilsit. 

1808. Napoleon made his brother Joseph King of Spain. 

1810. Spanish America became republican. 

1811. Alexander withd!rew from the "Coutinental Sys- 

tem." 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1119 

A.D. 

1812. Moscow. 

1814. Abdication of Napoleon. Louis XVIII. 

1815. The Waterloo campaign. The Treaty of Vienna. 
1819. The First Factory Act passed through the efforts of 

Robert Owen. 
1821. The Greek revolt. 

1824. Charles X of France. 

1825. N'icholas I of Russia. First railway, Stockton to Dar- 

lington. 
1827. Battle of Navarino. 

1829. Greece independent. 

1830. A year of disturbance. Louis Philippe ousted Charles 

X. Belgium broke away from Holland. Leopold of 
Saxe^Coburg-Gotha became king of this new country, 
Belgium. Russian Poland revolted ineffectually. 

1832. The First Reform Bill in Britain restored the demo- 
cratic character of the British Parliament. 

1835. The word socialism first used. 

1837. Queen Victoria. 

1840. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg- 
Gotha. 

1848. Another year of disturbance. Republics in France and 
Rome. The Pan-slavic conference at Prague. All 
Germany united in a parliament at Frankfort. Ger- 
man unity destroyed by the King of Prussia. 

1851. The Great'Exhibition of London. 

1852. N'apoleon III Emperor of the French. 

1854. Perry (second expedition) landed in Japan. Xicholns 
I occupied the Danubian provinces of Turkey. 

1854-56. Crimean War. 

1850. Alexander II of Russia. 

1857. The Indian Mutiny. 

185^. Robert Owen died.' 

1850. Franco-Austrian war. Battles of Magenta and Sol- 
ferino. 

1861. Victor Emmanuel First Kino- of Italy. Abraham Lin- 
coln became President, U.S.A. The American Civil 
War began. 

1863. British bombarded a Japanese town. 

1864. Maximilian became Emperor of Mexico. 



1120 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 

A.D, 

18G5. Surrender of Appomattox Court House, Japan opened 
to the world. 

18G6. Prussia and Italy attacked Austria (and the south Ger- 
man states in alliance with her). Battle of Sadowa. 

1867. The Emperor Maximilian shot. 

1870. Xapoleon HI declared war against Prussia. 

1871. Paris surrendered (January). The King of Prussia 

hecame William I, "German Emperor," The Hohen- 
zollern Peace of Frankfort. 
1875. The "Bulgarian atrocities." 

1877. Eusso-Turkish "War. Treaty of San Stefano. Queen 

Victoria hecame Empress of India. 

1878. The Treaty of Berlin. The Armed Peace of forty-six 

years hegan in western Europe. 
1881. The Battle of :\rajuha Hill. The Transvaal free. 
1883. Britain occupied Egypt. 
1886. Gladstone's first Irish Home Paile Bill. 
1888. Frederick II (March), William II (June), German 

Emperors. 
1890. Bismarck dismissed. Heligoland ceded to Germany by 

Lord Salisbury. 
1894-5. Japanese war with China. 

1895. "Unionist" (Imperialist) govei-nment in Britain. 

1896. Battle of Adowa. 

1898. The Fashoda quarrel between France and Britain. Ger- 

many acquired Kiau-Chau. 

1899. The war in South Africa began (Boer war). 

1900. The Boxer risings in China. Siege of the Legations at 

Peking. 
1904. The British invaded Tibet. 
1904-5. Russo-Japanese war. 

1906. The "Unionist" (Imperialist) party in Great Britain 

defeated by the Liberals upon the question of tariffs. 

1907. The Confederation of South Africa established. 

1908. Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

1909. M. Bleriot flew in an aeroplane from France to Eng- 

land. 

1911. Italy made war on Turkey and seized Tripoli. 

1912. China became a republic. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1121 

1913. The Balkan league made war on Turkey. J^loodshed at 

Londonderry in Ireland caused by "Unionist" gun 
running. 

1914. The Great War in Europe began (for which see s|>ecial 

time chart, pp. 1052-53). 
1917. The two Russian revolutions. Establishment of the 

Bolshevik regime in Russia. 
1919-20. The Clemenceau Peace of Versailles. 
1920. Eirst meeting of the League of Nations, from which 

Germany, Austria, Russia, and Turkey were excluded, 

and at which the United States was not represented. 
And here our List of Events breaks off with a note of interro- 
iration. 



1122 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 













^^"ip^Vl 




CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



112S 




1124 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 









Hi 
h 










\WI %r n 'tip- 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 



1125 




112( 



THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY 




INDEX 



KEY TO PRONUNCIATION 

VOWELS 

as in far (tar), father (fa' iA^r), mikado (mi ka' do). 
„ fat (fat), ample (ampl), abstinence (Sb' stin ens). 
,, fate (fat), wait (wat), deign (dan), jade (jad). 
,, fall (fawl), appal (a pawl'), broad (brawd). 
,, fair (far), bear (bar), where (hwar). 

„ bell (bel), bury (ber'i). 

,, her (h6r), search (serch), word (wSrd), bird (bSrd). 

,, beef (bef), thief (thef), idea (i de' d), beer (ber), casino (kd se' no). 

„ bit (bit), lily (lil'i), nymph (nimf), build (bild). 
„ bite (bit), analyse (an' d llz), light (lit). 

,, not (not), watch (woch), cough (kof), sorry (sor'i). 

,, no (no), blow (bl6), brooch (broch). 

,, north (north), absorb (dh sorb'). 

,, food (food), do (doo), prove (proov), blue (bloo), strew (stroo). 

,, bull (bul), good (gud), would (wud). 
,, sun (sun), love (luv), enough (enuf). 
,, muse (muz), stew (stu), cure (kur). 

,, bout (bout), bough (bou), crowd (kroud). 
,, join (join), joy (joi), buoy (boi). 

A short mark placed over a, e, o, or u (d, e, 6, t<) signifies that the 
vowel has an obscure, indeterminate, or slurred sound, as in: — ■ 

advice (dd vis'), current (kiir'ent), notion (no'shfin), 

breakable (bra' kdbl), sailor (sa' l<5r), pleasure (plezh' lir). 



CONSONANTS 

"s" is used only for the sibilant "s" (as in "toast," tost, "place," 
plas); the sonant "s" (as in "toes," "plays") is printed "z" (toz, plaz). 

"c" (except in the combinations "ch" and "ch"), "q" and "x" are 
not used. 

b, d, f, h (but see the combinations below), k, 1, m, n (see n below), p, r, 
t, V, z, and w and y when used as consonants have their usual values. 

ch as in church (chgrch), batch (bS,ch), capriccio (ka pre' cho). 
ch ,, ,, loch (loc/i), coronach (kor'o nac/i), clachan (klacA' an). 

g „ „ get (get), finger (fing'ger). 

j ,, ,, join (join), judge (jiij), germ (jSrm), ginger (jin' jer). 

gh (in List of Proper Names only) as in Ludwig (luf vigh). 
hi ( „ „ „ „ ) „ „ Llandilofhlandl'lo). 

hw as in white (hwit), nowhere (no' hwar). 

,, cabochon (ka bo shon'), conge (kon' zha). 



i 
k 
aw 

a 



,, shawl (shawl), mention (men'shwn). 
,, measure (mezh' wr), vision (vizh' <5n). 

,, thin (thin), breath (breth). 
„ thine (thm), breathe {hreth). 



The accent (') follows the syllable to be stressed. 



INDEX 



Aar (ar) Valley, 754 
Aaronson, Aaron, 131 
Abbasids {d bSs' Idz), 595, 601, 625, 628, 

636, 667, 686, 1110 
Abd Manif (abd man ef), 571 
Abdal Malik (abd al ma' lik), 594 
Abelard, P., 728 
Aboukir (a boo ker'), 895, 896 
Aboukir, cruiser, 1042 
Abraham the Patriarch, 142, 218, 221, 

231, 232, 500, 572 
Absolutism, 768 
Abu Bekr (a' boo bek' St), 572-73, 579- 

88, 599, 1109 
Abul Abbas, 596, 1110 
Abul Fazl (a' bool fa' zl), 695 
Abydos (d bl' dos), 283-88 
Abyssinia, 121, 126, 986 
Abyssinian Christians, 524, 539, 568, 

572; language, 120 
Academie des Sciences, 791 
Academy, Greek, 299-301 
Academy of Inscriptions, 857 
Acre, 157, 896 

Acropolis id krop' d lis), 257, 285 
Act of Union, 1017 

Actium (ak'tiwm), battle of, 444, 1106 
Acts of the Apostles, 510, 511 
Adam and Eve, 953 
Adams, Prof. G. B., 611 
Adams, John, 849 
Adams, Samuel, 837, 849 
Adams, William, 991 
Addington, 903 
Aden, 126, 144, 597, 997 
Adowa (a'dowa), battle of, 561, 625, 

996, 1025, 1120 
Adrianople, 481, 683, 1025; Treaty of, 

920 
Adriatic, 216, 331, 386, 395, 404, 468, 

489, 527, 537. 617, 644, 907, 1032 
Adriatic river, 89, 90 
^gatian Isles, 403, 1 105 
iEgean (e je' dn) cities, 177; civilization, 

159-62, 221, 252; Dark Whites, 382; 

hunters, 267 



^«ina (e jl' nd), 285 

iEneid (e' ne id), the, 382 

.Eolic dialect, 252 

Aeroplanes, 3, 930, 1041, 1044 

Aeschylus (es' ki Ms), 166, 1104 

Afghanistan, 120, 147, 369, 371, 547 
49, 562, 693, 806 

Africa, 43, 81, 91, 114, 120, 121, 129, 221 
421, 439, 674, 699; peoples of, 65, 81 
108, 111. 113, 125-26, 143. 152, 158, 
177, 712; languages of, 124-25; early 
trade with, 162, 215; Moslems in 
587, 590, 596, 606, 616, 628, 632, 1110 
voyages and travels in, 163, 439 
741-43, 803; Phcenicians in, 381, 493 
560; Roman, 402, 409, 427, 467, 488, 
526; Vandals in, 482, 527, 536, 1108 
slavery in, 748, 780; modern exploita 
tion of, 886-87, 979, 985, 1009 

Africa, Central, 125, 485; East, 29, 248 
South (see South Africa); West. 165, 
768 

African lung fish, 21 

Agincourt, 735 

Agriculture, early, 77, 84-87, 100, 107, 
125, 136, 196, 242; slaves in, 201; 
Arab knowledge of, 603; in Great 
Britain, 820-22 

Agriculturists, 206, 208, 211 

Agrimentum (ag ri men' titm), 402 

Agrippina (ag ri pi' nd), 454 

Ahriman (a' ri man), 545-47 

Ainu (I'noo), 108, 811, 991 

Air, the, 3, 19 

Air Force, 595 

Aisne (an), 1037; battle of the, 612 

Aix-la-Chapelle, 627 

Akbar (ak' ber), 693, 805, 1115 

Akhnaton (ak na' ton). 193-94. (See 
Amenophis IV) 

Akkadia (and Akkadians), 137, 188 

Akkadian-Sumerian Empire, 142, 1103 

Alabama, the, 970 

Alamanni, 480, 613, 1108 

Alans, 476, 481. .548, 1106 

Alaric (al'drik), 481, 489. 1109 

Alaska, 1028 

Alban, St., 614 



1129 



1130 



INDEX 



Alban Mount, 383 

Albania, 1044 

Albert, Prince Consort, 963, 1011, 1114 

Albertus Magnus, 400 

Albigenses (al bi jen' sez), 655-58 

Alcarez (al car' ez), 763 

Alchemists, 731 

Alcibiades (al si bl' d dez), 299 

Alcmseonidse (alk me on' i de), 264 

Alcohol, discovery of, 602 

Alcuin (al'kwin), 624 

Alemanni. (See Alamanni) 

Aleppo, 640 

Alexander the Great, 141, 144, 147, 151, 
162, 194, 195, 217. 293, 302-3, 309, 
341, 342, 350, 367, 380, 387, 400, 
436, 439, 452, 470, 474, 4S9, 519, 
562, 616, 642, 675, 705, 7.55, S50, 1105; 
empire of (maps), 335, 339; mother 
of, 387 

Alexander, son of Alexander the Great, 
336 

Alexander II, king of Egypt, 430 

Alexander I, tsar of Russia, 905-8, 
913-16, 919, 941, 947, 1000-2, 1119 

Alexander II, tsar of Russia, 1119 

Alexander III (pope), 659-61, 1119 

Alexander VI (pope), 751, 1113 

Alexandretta, 322, 325 

Alexandria, 10. 325, 331, 337-38, 367, 
396, 428, 455, 461, 466, 491, 510, 532, 
535, 600, 655, 895, 899, 1108; mu- 
seum at, 303, 343, 350, 408, 422, 
557; culture and religion of, 303, 352, 
513, 523, 602; library at, 344, 350; 
Serapeum, 352. 353 

Alexandrian cities, 215 

Alexius Comnenus (a lek' si lis kom ne'- 
nus), 639-43 

Alfred, king, 618, 707, 1111 

Alga;, 7 

Algebra (al'jebrd), 164, 602, 652 

Algeria, 75, 163, 1025 

Algiers, 687, 780, 996 

Ali (a' le), nephew of Muhammad, 572, 
573, 579, 591, 595, 628, 1109 

Alkmaar (alk mar'), siege of, 771, 773 

Allah, 571, 586, 591-92 

Alleghany mountains, 828 

Allen, Grant, 102 

Alp Arslan (alp ars Ian'), 636 

Alphabets, 173, 254, 361. 548, 558-60 

Alps, the, 38, 55, 404, 407, 437, 527, 623, 
627, 646, 749 

Alsace. 480, 755, 786, 795, 972-74 

Alstadt, 736 

Altai (al' tl), the, 474, 554 



Altamira (al td mer' d), cave ol, 72, 
1102 

Aluminium, 927 

Alva, General, 770-3 

Alyattes (a Hafez), 266 

Amadis (am' a dis) de Gaul, 723 

Am bar, 696 

Amber, 72, 461 

Amenophis (am e no' fis) II, 227 

Amenophis III, 146, 165, 188, 192 

Amenophis IV, 142, 165, 188, 192-94, 
197, 220, .351, 381 

America, 43, 46, 75, 165, 805, 937; pre- 
historic, 75, 76, 82, 115, 153; races of, 
108, 111, 125, 154; languages of , 117, 
124; discovery of, 555-56, 560, 618, 
648 sgq., 678, 742, 749, 801, 818, 1114; 
European settlements in, 801-4. 821- 
23. 826-40, 850, 1116. (See also 
United States) 

America, Central, drawings, 153 

America, South, 153, 724, 743, 746-48, 
916, 983, 1115-18 

American Indians, 85, 94, 107, 113, 124- 
26, 153, 171, 724, 746, 804, 991 

American king-crab, 8; picture writing, 
153 

Amiens, 1050; Peace of, 490, 492 

Amir, 684 

Amman (Philadelphia), 541-43 

Ammon, 192, 193, 325, 341, 351, 523 

Ammonites, 33 

Ammonites, a people, 232 

Amoeba (d me' bd), 13 

Amorites, 138, 218 

Amos the prophet, 233 

Amphibia, 22, 24, 26, 38-39, 42 

Amphictyonies (am fik' ti on iz), 263, 
569, 573 

Amphion, cruiser, 1036 

Amphipolis {'km fip' 6 lis), 314 

Amritzar (am rit' sdr), 982 

Amur (a moor'), 809 

Anabaptists, 715-20, 1115 

Anabasis (d nab' d sis), the, 290 

Anagni (a nan' ye), 663, 1113 

Anatoha, 636, 682 

Anatolian peninsula, 544 

Anatomy, 343, 344, 733 

Anaxagoras (an dk s&g' 6 ras), 296, 
302-7 

Andaman (an' dd man) Islands, 109 

Andes, 38 

Angelo, St., 1109 

Angles, 482, 526, 614, 619, 630 

Anglia, East, 605 

Anglo-Norman feudalism, 608 



INDEX 



1131 



"Anglo-Saxon," 1012 

Anglo-Saxons, 492, 526, 532, 611, 690. 

709 
Animals, 8, 14, 17-18, 20-22, 40. 42, 

48, 50, 77, 81, 83, 87, 96, 196. (.See 

also Mammals) 
Anio, the, 392, 531 
Anna Comnena (kom ne' r a), 644 
Annam, 554, 561, 811, 994, 996 
Anne, queen, 781 
Anselm, St., 728 
Antarctic birds, 32 
Antigonus (an tig' o mis), 337 
Antimony, 80 
Antioch, 457, 511, 525, 538, 542, 585, 

642, 1107 
Antioehus (an ti' d kus) III, 406, 413, 

415 
Antioehus IV, 496 
Antonines, 455, 460, 466, 470, 1106 
Antoninus (an to nl' nws), Marcus Aure- 

iius, 455, 457, 469, 712, 1107 
Antoninus Pius, 455, 463, 1107 
Antony, 442, 444 
Antwerp, 736, 741 
Anu, 188 

Anubis (a nu' bis), Egyptian god, 179 
Anytus (an'itiis), 299 
Apamea (ap d me' d), 542 
Apes, 49, 51, 54, 175; anthropoid, 44, 47, 

48 
Apion, 430 

Apis (a' pis), 324, 451, 512 
Apollinaris Sidonius, 527 
Apollo, 263, 273, 532 
Apollonius (a p<5 16' ni its), 343 
Appian Way, 394, 436 
Apples, 85 

Appomattox Court House, 971, 1119 
Aquileia (akwela'yd), 395, 487 
Aquinas (d kwi' nds), 728 
Arabia, 81, 91, 120, 121, 126, 133, 142, 

163, 173, 214, 220, 233, 342, 461, 539, 

544, 554, 567, 569, 571, 577, 582, 584, 

591, 616, 640, 660. (.See also Arabs) 
Arabian Nights, the, 597 
Arabic language and literature, 121, 122, 

459, 594, 596, 599, 718 
Arabs, 275, 494, 554, 567, 574, 582, 585, 

593, 596, 603, 606, 625, 675, 708, 718; 

culture of, 600, 726 
Aral sea, 120, 126, 329, 731 
Aral-Caspian region, 267 
Arameans, 139, 201, 206, 494, 551, 567 
Arbela (arbe'ld), battle of, 327, 411, 

1104 
Arcadius, 482, 1108 



Archajopteryx (ar ke op' t^r iks), 32 
Archaeozoic (ar ke 6 z6' ik) period, 7. 

(«See also Azoic) 
Archers, 182, 314 
Archimedes (ar ki me' dez), 345, 408, 

463 
Architecture, 625, 736 
Arctic birds, 32; circle, 553; Ocean, 120; 

seas, 702 
Ardashir (ar dasher'), I, 538, 546, 1107 
Ardennes, 1037 
Argentine republic, 127, 983 
Argon, 680 
Argonne, 875 
Argos, 388 

Ariadne (^r i lid' ni), 161 
Arians (ar' i dnz), 515, 522 
Aridajus (ar i de' lis), 318, 336 
Aristagoras (ar is tag' d ras), 289 
Aristarchus, 326 

Aristides (ar is tl' dez), 263, 285, 294 
Aristocracy, 135, 208, 258 
Aristodemus (dr is to de' miis), 284 
Aristophanes (ar is tof d nez), 166, 1104 
Aristotle, 165, 256, 264, 301-9, 321, 

325, 334, 340, 343, 350, 372, 424, 459, 

491, 600, 601, 653, 705, 726, 730, 795; 

Politics of, 258-62, 396, 398 
Arithmetic, 164-65 
Arius (dri' ws), 515, 522 
Arizona, 1028 
Ark of bulrushes, 155 
Ark of the Covenant, 188, 222-26 
Aries (arl), 522, 530, 1107 
Armadillo, giant, 76, 153 
Armenia (and the Armenians), 240, 

268, 337, 436, 452, 455, 475, 476, 

524, 537, 541, 628, 636, 675, 679, 

682, 712 
Armenian language, 118, 240 
Arno, 385, 394, 395 
Arras, 869, 1039 
Arrow, 437 

Arrow heads, 77, 78, 85, 100 
Arrow straighteners, 69-74 
Arsacids (arsas'idz), 452-537, 1107 
Arses, 290 
Art, Buddhist, 367; Cretan, 159-60; 

Neolithic, 98; Palaeolithic, 71, 74, 93, 

99 
Artabanus (ar td ba' mis), 283 
Artaxerxes II, 290, 306 
Artaxerxes III, 290 
Artillery, 314, 684 
Artisans, 206-12 
Artois (ar twa'). Count of. {See Charles 

X) 



1132 



INDEX 



Aryan, languages and literature, 104, 
118, 121, 127, 129, 236, 238, 239, 243, 

329, 381, 797; peoples and civiliza- 
tions, 99, 118, 125, 134, 142, 186, 190, 
221, 236, 239, 243, 255, 265-66, 268, 

330, 354, 381, 382, 472, 476, 480, 
485, 703, 726, 740, 746 

Aryan Way, the, 355, 361, 371, 379, 384 

As, Roman coin, 400 

Ascalon, 221 

Asceticism, 359 

Ashdod, 189, 221 

Ashtaroth (^sh' td roth), 222, 225, 227 

Asia, general and early period, 43, 49, 
55, 56, 65, 75, 81, 87, 119, 121-26, 
143, 214, 239, 265, 267, 464, 474, 478, 
484, 545, 548, 636, 662, 666-69, 675, 
712, 726, 742, 797, 936, 990, 1107; 
Greeks in, 274, 318, 331, 337; Romans 
in, 338, 412, 430, 461, 468; tribes 
and people of, 437, 472, 480, 674, 
687, 694, 696, 809, 815; Christianity 
in, 447, 519, 524, 538, 634, 675, 
678; Turks in, 539-40, 589, 593, 616, 
628, 630, 681, 683; voyages and trav- 
els in, 548, 561, 743, 749, 988 

Asia, Central, 75, 108, 125, 126, 239, 

267, 469, 597, 699, 749, 809; tribes, 
people, and civilization of, 133, 329, 
435, 525, 688 

Asia, Eastern, 108, 111 

Asia, Southeastern, languages of, 123 

Asia, Western, 68, 114, 667, 725; tribes, 

people, and civilization of, 111, 112, 

164, 177, 725 
Asia Minor, 80, 119, 165, 208, 239, 

268, 275. 337, 443-45, 449, 538, 543, 
594, 673, 697; tribes and people of, 
135, 158, 239, 265-66, 330, 382; 
Greeks in, 252, 254, 259, 265, 289, 
1107; Gauls in, 337, 384, 1105; Turks 
in, 596, 598, 636, 667, 674, 681 

Asiatics, intellectual status of, 988 

Asoka (aso'ka). King, 142, 350, 368, 
369, 421, 549, 564, 693, 1105 

Aspasia (as pa' shi d), 293, 298 

Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H.. 1020, 1040 

Ass, wild, 163 

Assam, 980 

Assisi (a se' zi), 658 

Assur, 139, 351 

Assurbanipal. {See Sardanapalus) 

Assyria (and Assyrians), 139-40, 146, 
151, 161, 168, 183-92, 197, 202, 218, 
229-33, 266-67, 269, 275, 290, 325, 
326, 381, 455, 494, 794, 1103 

Assyrian language and writing, 120, 172 



Asteroids, 2 

Astrologers, 731 

Astronomy, 2, 184, 307, 602, 675, 731 

Athanasius, 515, 522 

Atheism, 879 

Athene (d the'ne), 296 

Athens, 204, 252-65, 280-301, 315, 319. 
321, 327, 391, 394, 400, 464, 511, 543, 
1007, 1025, 1045; social and political, 
166, 258-60. 296, 298-301, 310-12, 
393, 395, 706; literature and learning, 
291, 309, 342, 343, 348, 534, 557, 1108 

Atkinson, C. F., 872 

Atkinson, J. J., 59, 95, 885 

Atlantic Ocean, 55, 88, 90, 108, 119, 461, 
560, 588, 648, 749, 817; navigation of, 
163, 741, 743, 746, 924, 1114 

Atlantosaurus (at Ian to saw' rus), 29 

Atmosphere, 3, 6 

Aton (a' ton), Egyptian god, 193 

Atonement, 499, 511 

Attalus (at'dlus), 317 

Attains I, 338 

Attalus III, 338, 430. 1105 

Attica (at' i kd), 280-81, 391 

Attila (at'ild), 485, 529, 550, 607, 1108 

Aughrim, battle of, 1015 

Augsburg, 761-65 

Augurs, Roman, 397 

Augustine, St., Bishop of Hippo, 514, 
525, 526, 637, 1108 

Augustus Caesar, Roman Emperor, 448, 
452, 463, 470, 520, 640, 1106 

Aurangzeb. (See Aurungzeb) 

Aurelian, emperor, 455, 481, 523, 538, 
1107 

Aurignacian (aw rig na' shun) age, 73, 
243 

Aurungzeb (aw rung zab'), 693, 805, 979, 
1116 

Ausculum, battle of, 387, 1105 

Austerlitz, 905, 1118 

AustraUa, 62, 152, 556, 979, 983, 997; 
aborigines of , 109-11 

Australian language, 129; lung-fish, 22; 
throwing-stick, 69 

Australoids, 111, 125, 152 

Austrasia, 610, 612 

Austria, 755, 759, 783, 792-95, 801, 826, 
859, 865, 872, 974; wars with France, 
872, 876, 894, 899, 905, 911, 1119; 
war with Prussia, 970-72, 1120; in 
Great War, 1033, 1050, 1080, 1120 

Autocracy, 290, 774 

Automobiles, 930 

Avars, 487, 491, 537, 541, 589, 612, 632, 
673 



INDEX 



1133 



Avebury, 83, 142, 383 

Avebury, Lord. 78, 80, 83 

Averroes (a ver' 6 ez), 601, 658, 726, 728, 

1112 
Avicenna (av i sen' <!), 1111 
Avignon (a ve nyon'), 649, 663, 687, 708, 

1113 
Axes, ancient, 77, 80, 85, 101 
Axis of earth, 44 
Ayesha (V ishd), 577, 591 
Azilian age, 69, 73, 74, 89, 103, 119 
Azoic (a zo' ik) period, 7, 11, 14 
Azores, 741 
Aztecs, 746 



Baal, 180, 222, 230 

Baalbek (bal bek'), 542, 568 

Babel, Tower of, 136 

Baber, 693, 755, 805, 1114 

Baboons, 49, 50, 175 

Babylon (and Babylonia), 138, 147, 164, 
168, 172, 188, 200, 205, 209, 217, 218, 
229, 232, 266. 270, 274, 289. 290, 307, 
325, 327, 331, 336, 350, 355, 363, 376, 
384, 428, 437, 439, 461, 494, 506, 541- 
45. 551, 552, 567, 636, 691, 824, 886, 
1102-5; religion of, 181, 183 188, 
189, 217, 234, 341. 369 

Bacchus. 445 

Bacharach, 737 

Back Bay, 837 

Bacon, Francis. Lord Verulam, 302, 733, 
1115 

Bacon, Roger, 230, 233, 923, 1115 

Bactria (and Bactrians), 337, 475. 
537 

Baden, 971 

Badr (bad'gr). battle of, 573, 592, 
1109 

Baedeker, 793 

Baganda. 152 

Bagaudee, 716 

Bagdad, 596, 602, 625, 628, 636, 640, 645, 
667, 674, 687, 691, 1032, 1044, 1110, 
1113 

Bagoas (bago'as), 290 

Bahamas, 804, 998 

Baikal (bl kal'), 670 

Baldwin of Flanders, 646, 770 

Balearic Isles, 482 

Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 1068 

Balkan peninsula, 75, 120, 142, 239, 252, 
267, 337, 485, 623, 682, 699, 740, 973, 
1024, 1032, 1102, 1120 

Balkash, lake, 669 



Balkh, 679 

Ball, John, 716 

Balliol College, 660 

Balloons, 3 

Baltic Sea, 45, 75, 120, 126, 440, 461, 468, 

476, 480, 617, 618. 630. 635. 689, 739, 

786. 816, 1048 
Baltimore, Lord, 829 
Baluchistan. {See Baluchistan) 
Bambyce (bam bl' se). 542 
Bannockburn. 735 
Bantu, 124, 129. 135 
Barbados, 803 
Barbarians, 817-18 
Barbarossa, Frederick. (»See Frederick 

I, emperor) 
Barca family, 405 
Barcelona, 616, 736 
Bards, 175, 243-44 
Barley, 84, 242, 485 
Baroda (baro'dd), 806 
Barons, Revolt of the, 774 
Barras (bara'), 883, 894 
Barrows, 82, 236, 241, 245 
Barry, Comtesse du. (See Du Barry) 
Basle, Council of, 664, 712, 1114 
Basque language. 127, 129, 135, 236; 

race, 127, 129, 238, 1014 
Basra, 601, 1044 
Bassompierre, 863 
Bastille, 858, 1118 
Basu. Bhupendranath, 248, 251 
Basutoland, 998 
Batavian Republic, 891 
Bats, 29 

Bauernstand, 209 
Bavaria (and Bavarians), 613, 621, 735, 

971, 1009 
Bayezid (bi e zed') II, Sultan, 685. 

1114 
Baylen, 907 
Bazaine, General, 971 
Beaconsfield, Earl of, 782, 973, 981 
Bears, 52, 57, 71, 73 
Beauharnais, Josephine de, 894, 908 
Beauty, artistic, 160 
Beaver, European, 52 
Beazley., Raymond, 631 
Bode, the Venerable, 529, 614, 1110 
Bedouins, 206, 218, 544, 568, 574, 576, 

582, 589 
Beech, fossil, 37 
Bees, 37 
Behar, 1105 

Behring Straits, 76, 125, 126 
Bektashi, order of dervishes, 683 
Bel, 189, 222, 274 



1134 



INDEX 



Belgium, 610. 642, 754, 771, 872, 876 

883, 891, 914, 919, 1032, 1034, 1037, 

111.3 
Belisarius, 532 

Bellerophon (be ler' o fon), frigate, 915 
Bel-Marduk (bel mar' dook), 189, 1IJ3 

327, 351, 523 
Belshazzar, 190, 274 
Beluchistan (bel oo chi stan'), 997; lan- 
guages of, 135 
Benaiah, 226 
Benares (bena'rez), 356, 360, 365. 384, 

475, 549 
Benedict, St., 531. 535, 600, 660, 

1109 
Benedictines, 533, 723 
Beneventum, 388 
Bengal, 250, 331, 355, 357, 693, 806, 

808 
Bengal, Bay of, 126 
Benin, 420 

Benjamin, tribe of, 223 
Beowulf (ba' 6 wulf), 245, 251 
Berar, 693 

Berber language, 121-25, 238 
Berbers. 152 
Bergen, 736, 739, 741 
Berkeley, George, 1016 
Berliere, 532 
Berlin, Treaty of, 974, 1000, 1071, 

1120 
Bermuda, 998 
Bernard, brother, 658 
Bes, Egyptian god, 179 
Bessemer process, 926 
Bessus, satrap, 328 
Bethlehem, 498 
Beth-shan, 225 
Bhurtpur (bh6rt poor'), 805 
Bible, the, 139, 222, 228, 342, 350, 494, 

496, 625, 656, 660, 709, 710, 718, 720, 

725, 766, 794 
Birch tree, 37 
Birds, 3, 29, 32, 40 

Birkenhead, Lord. {See Smith, Sir F. E.) 
Birth-rate in ancient Athens, 264 
Biscay, Bay of, 905 
Bismarck, Prince, 968, 971, 1004, 1007, 

1120 
Bison (bi'son), 52, 57, 70, 71, 75, 153 
Bithynia, 337, 415, 430, 436, 441, 488, 

521 
Black Death, 712, 1113 
Black Friars, 658 
Black Hundred, 958 
Black lead, 7 
Black Prince, 735 



Black Sea, 89, 120, 126, 142, 202, 239, 
253, 266, 289, 294, 337, 437, 440, 476, 
480, 521, 527, 542, 631, 635, 640, 672 

Blake, Admiral, 780, 806 

Bleriot, M., 1120 

BHnd bards, 244 

Blood sacrifice, 511, 513, 708 

Blue Mountains, 828 

Blucher, Marshal, 914 

Blues, faction of t e, 797 

Blunt, W. S., Ill 

Bo Tree, 360, 371 

Boadicea (bo d de se' a), 454, 1106 

Boars, 52 

Boats, 153-59. (See also Ships) 

Body, painting of, 71 

Bceotia (be 6' shi a), 285 

Boer Republics, 987, 1008, 1013 

Boer War, 417, 958, 1008 

Boethius (bo e' thi its), 602 

Bohemia (and Bohemians), 482, 616, 
640,.711, 712, 720, 785 

Bohemond, 644 

Bokhara (bo kha' ra), 474, 601, 670, 678 

Boleyn, Anne, 761 

Bolivar (bol' i var). General, 916 
Bologna (bolon'ya), 724, 726, 736, 760 

Bolshevists, 947, 1048, 1057, 1060 

Bombay, 807 

Bonaparte, Joseph, 904, 907, 916, 1119 

Bonaparte, Louis, 904 

Bonaparte, Lucien, 897 

Bonaparte, Napoleon. (.See Napoleon I) 

Boncelles (bon sel'), 51 

Bone carvings, 73-4; implements, 69, 74, 

85, 613, 616 
Boniface, St., 1110 
Boniface VIII, Pope, 662, 1112 
Boniface, Roman Governor, 484 
Book-keeping, Aramean, 200 
Books, 195, 344, 348, 718. (,Sec also 

Printing) 
Bordeaux, 736 
Borgia, Alexander. {See Alexander VI, 

Pope) 
Borgia, Caesar and Lucrezia, 751 
Boris, king of Bulgaria, 635, 1110 
Borneo, 115, 560 
Bosnia, 1009, 1120 

Bosphorus, 89, 119, 252, 253, 265, 275, 
279, 282, 288, 322, 489, 521, 540, 542, 
594, 596, 642, 682 
Bosses, American, 258 
Boston, Mass., 836, 840 
Bostra, 544 
Botany Bay, 979 
Botticelli (bot i chel' i), 740 



INDEX 



1135 



Boulogne, 736, 904 

Bourbon, Constable of, 759, 1114 

Bourbon, Duke of, 859 

Bourbons, 900, 913 

Bourgeois (boorzhwa'), Leon, 1073-76 

Bournville, 942 

Bow and arrow, 74, 85, 437 

Bowmen, Mongol, 679 

Boxer rising, 989, 990 

Boyle, Robert, 927, 1016 

Boyne, battle of the, 1015, 1116 

Brachiopods (brftk' i o podz), 8, 18 

Brachycephalic (brak i se fal' ik) skull, 

113 
Brahe (bra'h<s), Tycho, 732, 1115 
Brahma, 374, 694 
Brahminism (and Brahmins), 211-13, 

564-5-6, 355-6, 365, 368, 378, 549, 

669, 697, 805, 980 
Brain, 43, 58, 67 
Brandenburg, elector of, 786 
Brass, 80 

Brazil, 747, 748, 755, 971 
Bread in Neolithic Age, 84 
Bread-fruit tree, 37 
Breasted, J. H., 198 
Breathing, 19, 24 
Bremen, 634, 736-39 
Brennus, 385, 1104 
Breslau, 736 

Brest-Litovsk (brest le tov' sk), 1049 
Breton language, 238 
Briareus (brl' a roos), 216 
Brienne, 892 

Brindisi (bren' de ze), 632 
Bristol, 713 
Britain, 45, 83, 97, 214, 422, 463, 534, 

606, 61G, 630; invasions of, 481, 526, 

1108; Roman, 165, 166, 435, 439, 451 

55, 492, 605, 614, 1106; Keltic, 482. 

(See also England and Great Britain) 
British Association, 955 
British Civil Air Transport Commission, 

930 
British Empire (1815), 977, (1914), 

997-99 
British Empire, political life of, 424 
British Museum, 935 
"British" nationality, 1012 
"British schools," 934 
Britons, ancient. (<See Britain) 
Brittany, 115, 482, 616, 755 
Broglie, Marshal de, 858 
Brontosaurus (bron to saw' rws), 27 
Bronze, 79, 88, 153, 242; Chinese vessels 

of, 150; ornaments, 85; weapons, 80 
Bronze Age, 80, 101, 103, 142, 144, 157 



Brown, Campbell, 602 

Bruce, Robert the, 735 

Bruges (broozh), 736, 739, 770 

Brunellesco (broo ne les' ko), 740 

Brunswick, Duke of, 872, 875 

Brussels, 876, 1037 

Brutus, 421, 443 

Bubonic plague, 529 

Buda-Pesth (boo' d« pest), 760 

Buddha (bud' «), 142, 212, 358, .360, 371, 
376, 462, 497, 505, 513, 530, 545, 547, 
564-65, 657, 842, 1105; life of, 354 
sqq.; teaching of, 311, 360, 375, 939 

Buddhism, 212, 350, 355, 505, 530, 548- 
49, 553, 559, 564-65, 572, 667, 669, 
675, 679, 687, 810. (See also Buddha) 

Buddhist art, 366 

Budge, Wallis, 144, 192 

Buffon, Comte de, 954 

Building, 144 

Bulgaria (and Bulgarians), 451, 481, 
527, 589, 623, 634, 637, 661, 682, 69.), 
973, 1024, 1025, 1043, 1051, 1110 

Bulgarian atrocities, 1120 

Bulgarian language, 238 

Bull fights, Cretan, 215 

Bunbury, 162 

Blirgerstand, 239 

Burgoyne, General, 837 

Burgundy (and Burgundians), 432, 527, 
612, 735, 755, 770, 795, 865 

Burial, early, 63, 71, 81, 93, 100, 143, 
236, 241, 245 

Burke, Edmund, 1016 

Burmah (and Burmese), 85, 148. 678, 
811, 997 

Burmese language, 123 

Burnet, 297 

Burning the dead, 241 

Bushman language, 129 

Bushmen, 72, 111, 168 

Butter in Neolithic Age, 84 

Butterflies, 14, 37 

Buxar, 808, 1117 

Byzantine architecture, 625 

Byzantine church. (See Greek Church) 

Byzantine Empire, 451, 489, 540, 557, 
582-85, 589, 592, 603, 606, 618, 623, 
624, 628-33, 636, 638, 644, 1109-11 

Byzantium (bi ziin' tyum), 323, 556, 
583, 590, 601, 622, 626, 638, 666, 698, 
797. {See also Constantinople) 



Cabul (ka'bul), 328, 6 
Cadbury, Messrs., 942 



1136 



INDEX 



Cadiz (ka'diz), 895 

Caen (kan), 870 

Csesar, title, etc., 455, 492, 512, 516, 619, 

624 
Cajsar, Julius, 84, 103, 142, 341, 398, 

419, 424, 436, 440, 447, 458, 463, 470, 

618, 895, 897 
Caesars, the, 454, 467, 488 
Cahors, 757 

Caiaphas (kl' d fas), 508 
Cairlaux, M., 1033 
Cainozoic (kl no zo' ik) period, 10, 12, 

33, 35, 40, 43, 49 
Cairo, 601, 602 
Calabria, 409, 632, 633 
Calcutta, 807 
Calder, Admiral, 905 
Calendar, the, 99 
Calicut, 743, 807 
California, 206 

Caligula (kaiig'uld), 454, 1106 
Caliphs, 581, 584, 589, 600, 607, 625, 

628, 636, 685, 704, 1110, 1114 
Callicratidas (ka li kra' ti das), 321 
Callimachus (kd lim' d kiis), 345 
Callisthenes (kd Us' the nez), 334 
Calmette, 1033 
Calonne, 857-868 
Cambodia, 561 
Cam,bridge, University of, 459, 964, 

1011 
Cambridge, Mass., 838 
"Cambulac," 679 

Cambyses (kambl'sez), 274, 324, 1104 
Camels, 43, 163, 272 
Camillus (cd mil' ws), 393, 430, 433, 1104 
Campanella, 766 
Campo Formio, peace of, 895 
Camptosaurus (kamp to saw' rus), 27 
Canaan (and the Canaanites), 218, 567 
Canada, 7, 127, 805. 826-33, 839, 978, 

983, 997, 999, 1117 
Canary Isles, 741 
Candahar, 331 
Candles, ceremonial, 353 
Cannae (kan'e), battle of, 408, 411, 

1105 
Cannes, 914 

Cannibahsm, 236, 743, 746 
Cannon, 785-817 
Canoes, 156 
Canterbury, 613; archbishops of, 614, 

1110 
Canton, 554, 561 
Canusium (cd nuz' i wm), 464 
Canute, 630, 1111 
Cape Colony, 987 



Capernaum, 507 

Capet (ka pa'), Hugh, 626, 735, 1111 

Capitalism, 726, 824, 935, 943, 1056 

Caporetto, battle of, 1049 

Cappadocia, 337, 541, 544 

Capua (kap' u d), 408, 435 

Cardinals, 663, 687 

Caria (ka' ri a), 317-18, 542 

Caribou (kar i boo'), 58, 94, 107 

Carlovingians, 621, 1110, 1111 

Carlyle, Thomas, 792, 861 sqq., 881 

Carnac, 82, 242 

Carnivores, early type of, 43 

Carnivorous animals, 31 

Carnot (kar no'), L. N. M., 883, 894 

Carolina, 803, 829, 831, 836 

Carpathians, 634 

Carrha;, 437, 468, 537, 1106 

Carson, Sir Edward, 262, 958, 1019, 1022 

Carthage (and the Carthaginians), 142, 
158, 162-63, 184, 215, 232, 253, 324, 
342, 380, 383, 388, 428, 440, 444, 461, 
478, 488, 493, 495, 606, 653, 704, 740, 
1103-8; war with Rome, 388, 401, 417 

Carvings, Palaeolithic. (See Art) 

Casement, Sir Roger, 1023 

Cash, Chinese, 551 

Caspian Sea, ^9, 97, 119, 126, 239, 267, 
275, 329, 430, 436, 439, 476, 480, 
548, 554, 631, 670, 713, 1104, 1105, 
1106, 1112 

Caspian-Pamir region, 496 

Cassander, 337 

Cassiodorus (k&s i d dor' lis), 533, 535, 
600, 605, 1109 

Cassiterides (kS,s i ter' i dez), 163 

Cassius, Spurius, 392 

Caste, 210, 211 

Castile, 744, 755 

Castlemaine, Lady, 781 

Cat, 43, 175 

Catalonians, 741 

Catapult, 314 

Caterpillars, 62 

Cathars, 655 

"Cathay," 679 

Catnerine the Great, 792, 813, 816, 849, 
1117 

Catherine II, 800, 905 

Catholicism, 702, 709, 719, 728, 750, 
765, 783, 789, 798, 829, 1014, 1015, 
1018 

Catiline, 441 

Cato, Marcus Porcius, 405, 409, 412, 
417, 421, 428, 457 

Cattle, 52, 75, 163. (See also Animals) 

Caucasian languages, 118, 135 



INDEX 



1137 



Caucasians, 110-16, 118-26, 702 
Caucasus (kaw'kdsus), SO, 128, 275, 

541 
Caudine Forks, 1105 
Cavaliers, 777, 778 
Cavalry, 314 
Cave drawings, 73-4; dwellings, 236; 

men, 50, 54, 57, 67 
Cavour, 968 
Cawnpore, 981 
Caxton, William, 717 
Celebes (sel' e bez), pile dwellings, 82 
Celibacy, 352, 638, 709 
Celt-Iberian script, 173 
Celtic. (See Keltic) 
Celts, bronze, 101 
Cenotaph (Whitehall), 1081 
Ceremonies, early use of, 97 
Cervantes (ser va,n' tez), 700 
Ceylon, 360, 371, 462, 562, 806, 998 
Chaeronea (kerone'd), battle of, 312, 

315, 1104 
Chalcedon (kal se' don), 523, 539 
Chaldea (and the Chaldeans), 140, 146, 

147, 190, 207, 230, 260, 292, 327. 437, 

567, 1103 
Chaldean writing, 172 
Chalons, 867 

Champagne, depart., 1040, 1048 
Chancellor, Lord, of England, 721 
Chandernagore, 807 
Chandragupta (chan dra goop' ta), 368, 

380, 1105 
Chang Daoling, 371 
Chang-tu, 373 
Channa, the charioteer, 356 
Channing, 840, 882 
Chapman, G., 245 
Charcoal, 824 

Chariots, 138, 247, 314, 326 
Charlemagne, emperor, 371, 481, 553-54, 

612-16-18-19, 634, 660-62, 675, 693, 

707, 755, 763, 767, 788, 904, 1110 
Charles V, emperor, 700, 722, 739 sqq., 

755, 770, 783, 793, 1114-15 
Charles I, king of England, 768-75-78- 

81. 787, 791, 803, 829, 862 
Charles II, king of England, 733, 780, 

788, 794, 803, 829 
Charles VII, king of France, 735 
Charles IX, king of France. 829 . 
Charles X. king of France, 917 
Charles III, king of Spain, 816 
Charlotte Dundas, steamboat, 924 
Charmides (kar' mi dez), 299 
Charon, 421 
Charter House, London, 713 



Chateau Thierry, 1050 

Chateaurou.x, Duchess of, 791 

Chatham, Earl of. (^'ee Pitt, William) 

Cheese, 84 

Chellean age, 46, 52, 58-60. 66 

Chelles. 58 

Chemistry, 602 

Chemosh (ke'mosh), 227 

Chen, L. Y., 154, 171 

Chen, Tuan, 372 

Cheops (ke'ops), 144 

Chephren (kef ren), 144, 190-91 

Cherry-tree, 436 

Chieftains, 103, 247 

Child labour. 941 

Chimpanzee. 47, 51, 163 

Chin, absence of, 54 

China, 62, 78, 85, 126, 371. 461, 547, 
549. 582, 677, 694, 735, 749, 810; 
history (early history and great age of) , 
142, 148-51, 195, 213, 329, 331, 4.57. 
469-76, 537, 540, 550-55, 1103, 1107, 
1109; (10th to ISth century), 666, 667- 
79, 694, 698. 712, 810, 815. 1112. 1113; 
(20th century), 988-96, 1120; Chris- 
tianity in. 672. 725; civilization and 
culture, 112, 115, 142, 148, 213, 251. 
257, 525, 547. 550. 554 sqq., 603, 666, 
707, 719; other religions of, 195, 366, 
369, 373, 375, 810; social, 428, 550, 
991. (See also Chow, Han, Kin, Ming, 
Shang, Sung, Suy, Tang, Tsing, Wei, 
and Yuan dynasties) 

China, Great Wall of, 152, 213, 455, 562. 
1105 

Chinese, the. 47. 125; classics, 170, 558; 
coinage, 551; emperor, 183, 195, 485; 
language, 123, 126, 129, 168, 170, 559; 
script, 169. 172, 214, 558, 811 

Chios (kl'os), 643 

Chnemu, Egyptian god, 182 

Chosroes (koz' ro ez) I, 539, 588, 765, 
1109 

Chosroes II. 452. 539. 544, 568, 646, 1110 

Chow dynasty, 142, 150, 151, 195, 372, 
1103 

Christ. (See Jesus of Nazareth) 

Christian IX, 968 

Christian era, 1106 

Christian science, 726 

Christianity. 235, 449, 493, 538, 690, 720, 
794, 814, 954, 956; history (early), 423. 
511 sqq., 522. 524, 616. 618. 1107; 
(middle ages), 615. 628. 637-40. 650. 
659, 711; and Buddhism, 368, 379; and 
Islam, 579, 581, 593 sqq., 598, 645, 
675, 710; and Judaism, 708; and learn- 



INDEX 



ing,531 ffqq. ; missions and propaganda, 
420, 554, 613, 675, 687, 707, 900, 933- 
34, 991-92; official, 523 sqq., 619, 814, 
953; ritua! of, 353, 378, 467, 513, 523, 
653, 708, 716; sects, 516, 667, 677; 
spirit of, 352, 467, 499. 716, 938. {See 
also Jesus of Nazareth) 

Chronicles, book of the, 222 

Chronology. 615 

Ch'u, state of, 151 

Church, the, 521, 525, 602, 6.50, 652, 655, 
661, 708, 722, 732, 734, 821, 1113-14 

Churches, orientation of, 183 

Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 1044 

Cicero, M. Tullius, 419, 423, 443, 446 

Cilicia, 419, 541, 636, 643, 679 

Cilician Gates, 597, 642 

Cimmerians, 239, 266, 268, 330, 472, 682 

Cincinnatus, Order of, 901 

Circumcision, 112 

Cistercian order, 709 

Citizenship, 259, 261 

City States, Chinese, 151; Greek, 256, 
264, .306, 307, 312, 388; Sumerian, 137 

Civilization, 556, 698, 704, 716, 767; 
Aegean, 159-63; Hellenic, 254 sqq.; 
prehistoric. 111, 240 sqq.,2i6-4H; prim- 
itive, 153, 251, 702. (See also Culture) 

Clans, 242 

Class consciousness, 935, 944; distinc- 
tion, 134, 209; war, 210 

Classes, social, 204, 213 

Classics, study of the, 928 

Classification, 726 

Claudius, emperor (a.d. 41-54), 454, 
1106 

Claudius, emperor (a.d. 268-270), 481, 
1106 

Claudius, Appius, decemvir, 392 

Claudius, Appius, the Censor, 394-98 

Claudius, Consul, 401 

Clay documents, 136, 144, 189; model- 
ling. Palaeolithic, 73 

Clemenceau, G. B., 1068-71, 1120 

Clement V (pope), 663, 1113 

Clement VII (anti-pope), 633, 1113 

Cleon, 297 

Cleopatra, 440, 445 

Cleopatra (wife of Philip II), 317, 319 

Clergy, taxation of, 650 

Clermont, 639, 1111 

Clermont, steamer, 924 

Cleveland, President, 1029 

Climate, change of, 15, 17, 33, 37, 44, 81, 
241, 247, 269, 473, 478; effect of, 176, 
266 

Clitus (kll'tiis), 334, 705 



Clive, Robert, Lord, 807, 979, 1011, 1117 

Clodius, 441 

Clothing, 82, 85 

Clovis, 610, 612, 1108 

Clyde, Firth of, 924 

Cnossos (nos'ds), 142, 161-62, 168, 177 

199, 206, 231, 252, 254, 265, 268, 381 

382, 556, 1102 
Coal, 24, 25, 824, 923, 929 
Cockroaches, 24 
Code Napoleon, 901, 902 
Coinage, earlie.st, 165; Athenian, 166- 

Bactrian, 337; Carthaginian, 400; 

Lydian, 266; Roman, 388, 399 
Coinage of stamped leather, 653 
Coke, 824 
Cole, Langton, 158 
Collectivism, 947 
Cologne, 625, 736, 739 
Colonies, British, 826, 828, 997; scram- 
ble for, 977-87 
Colorado, 26 
Colosseum, 550, 606 
Columba, St., 614 
Columbus, Bartholomew, 742 
Columbus, Christopher, 741 sqq., 755, 

1102, 1114 
Comedy, Greek, 307 
Comet, 2, 529 

Commagene (kom d je' ne), 542 
Commodus (kom'odi/s), 456, 457 
Commons, House of, 774-82, 787, 833, 

844, 858, 937 
Commune, French Revolution, 872, 880 
Communism, 712, 716, 819, 820, 885, 

945, 947 
Communities, 242, 702, 706 
Community of obedience, 842; of will, 

842 
Comnena, Anna. {See Anna) 
Comnenus, Alexius. (.See Alexius " Com - 

panions," equestrian order, 312, 314 
Compass, 555-56, 749 
Concert of Europe, 915, 916, 922 
Concord, Mass., 837, 840 
Concord, Temple of, 430, 1104 
j Condor, the, 3 
Condorcet (kon dor sa'), 901 
Confucianism, 371, 376 
Confucius, 142, 213, 371, 376, 384, 505, 

539, 545, 556 
Congo, 125, 985 
Congress, American, 846 
Congress, 1st Colonial, 836 
Conifers, 26 

Connecticut, 828, 831, 836, 846 
Conrad II, 627 



INDEX 



1139 



Conrad III, 627 

Constance, 710 

Constance, Council of, 660, 664, 710, 
1113 

Constantine I the Great, 371, 420, 447, 
457, 481, 488, 516, 519, 523, 536, 
538-39, 546, 566, 693, 817, 1107 

Constantine, King of Greece, 1045 

Constantinople, 482, 485, 492, 521, 529, 
535-6-7-8-9, 568, 584-5, 589, 594, 
622, 631, 634, 637, 640, 646, 661, 672, 
678, 683, 689, 691, 739, 770, 797, 967, 
1025, 1032, 1107-14. (See also Byzan- 
tium) 

Consuls, Roman, 389 

Convicts sent to New England, 832 

Cooking, 77, 78 

Co-operative Societies, 942 

Copernicus (ko per' ni kus), 732, 1115 

Copper, 2, 78, 153, 746, 927 

Copper axes, 101 

Coptic language, 121 

Corday, Charlotte, 870 

Cordoba (kor' do ba), 601-2 

Corfu (kor foo'), 736 

Corinth (and Corinthians), 254, 284, 
318, 324, 417, 423, 428, 4,39, 441, 464, 
488, 511, 1105 

Corinth, isthmus of, 284 

Cornish people, 119 

Cornwall, 79, 163, 526, 605, 616, 780 

Cornwallis, General, 839 

Corrosive sublimate, 602 

Corsets, 160 

Corsica, 404, 482, 893 

Cortez, 747, 1114 

Corvus, the, 402 

Cossacks, 795, 809, 810 

Coster, printer, 717, 1114 

Cotton industry, 824 

Cotylosaur (kof i Id sawr), 23 

Councils, Church, 638, 659, 665, 710, 
712, 724, 1107, 1113 

Counting, 118 

"Counts of Asia Minor," 698 

Court system, 205 

Couvade (ku vad'), 113 

Cow, sacred to Brahmins, 981 

Cow deities, 180 

Crab-apples, 85 

Crabs, 8 

Cranach, 757 

Cranium, of apes, 54; Piltdown. (.See 
Piltdown) 

Crassus, 410, 436, 441, 475, 537, 585, 
1106 

Crawley, A. E., 102 



Creation, story of, 218, 231, 953 

Crecy, 735 

Credition, 61P^ 

Creeds, Christian, 515, 525, 637, 1107 

Cremation, 242 

Cressy, cruiser, 1042 

Cretan Labyrinth, 160; language, 129, 
227; script, 172 

Crete (and Cretans), 142, 158-62, 177, 
215, 221, 265, 266 

Crimea, 678, 712 

Crimean War, 967, 1114 

Criminals, Roman, 422; used for vivi- 
section, 343 

Crispus, son of Constantino, 526 

Critias, 299 

Croatia, 537 

Crocodiles, 28, 32 

Croesus (kre'sws), 165, 264, 270, 274, 
355, 1104 

Cro-Magnon race, 66, 72, 103 

Cromwell, OHver, 777, 780, 8.34, 1015 

Cromwell, Thomas, 753 

Cross, in Buddhist ritual, 368; true, 539, 
646 

Crown, the power of the, 782 

Crucifixion, 513 

Crusades, 599, 644, 647, 657, 661, 685, 
711, 735, 770, 934, 1111-14 

Crustaceans, 21 

Crystal Palace, 964 

Crystals, 14 

Ctesiphon (tes' i fon), 539, 543, 545-47, 
555, 588, 596, 646, 691, 1044 

Cuba, 748, 979, 1029 

Cubit, length of, 228 

Culture, Aryan, 242-51; Heliolithic, 
112, 127, 132, 135, 142, 148, 153, 
157, 169, 242, .354; NeoHthic, 76, 81, 
88 sqq., 98, 111, 112, 119, 132, 143, 148, 
151-54; prehistoric and primitive, 57 
sqq., 92 sqq. (See also Civilization) 

Cuneiform (ku' ne i form), 137, 172, 215 

Cup, pebble, 69 

Currency, 887-90, 923, 942, 950, 1056 

Cusieans, 336 

Custozza, 971 

Cuvier (ku-vya), 954 

Cyaxares (si ak' s« rez), 269, 1104 

Cycads (si' kddz), 25, 37 

Cynics, 304 

Cyprus, 80, 158, 270. 289, 324, 337, 974 

Cyrenaica (sir e na' i kd), 430 

Cyrene (si re' ne), 458 

Cyrus, the Great, 140-42, 165, 190, 202, 
217, 230, 264, 269, 273, 314, .331, .355, 
380, 451, 470, 543, 545, 1104 



1140 



INDEX 



Cyrus, the Younger, 290 
Czecho-Slovaks, 918 
Czechs (cheks), 482, 712 



Dacia, 455, 481, 491, 636 

Daedalus (de' dd his), 160 

Dagon, 189, 351 

Dalai Lama (da ll' la' ma), 376 

Dalmatia, 482, 527, 537, 616, 622, 1079, 

1107, 1109 
Damascus, 130, 164, 214, 452, 539, 544, 

567, 584, 585, 593, 596, 602, 713, 1109 
Damask, 214 
Damietta, 646 

Damon, friend of Pericles, 296 
Dancing, 243 
Danelaw, 618, 1111 
Danes, 617, 618, 630, 770, 1111 
Dante, 338 
Danton, 869, 872-81 
Danzig, 736, 800, 1080 
Danube, 119, 240, 275-78. 314, 320, 329, 

436, 437, 452, 455, 461, 468, 473, 475, 

479, 480, 481, 485. 491, 527, 537, 548, 

616, 634, 641, 700, 815, 1043, 1106 
Danubian provinces, 920, 967 
Dardanelles, 252, 681, 1043 
Darius (ddri'-iis) I, 191, 274, 277, 282, 

287, 328, 1104 
Darius II, 289 
Darius III, 322, 325, 326, 332, 337, 437, 

470, 682, 909 
Dark ages, the, 528 
Dartmouth, Lord, 851 
Darwin, Charles, 50, 954 
Darwinism, 954-58 
David, King, 225-30, 493, 498, 503, 715, 

1103 
Davids, Rhys, 359, 360, 367 
Dawes, 837 
Day, length of, 4, 37 
Dead, eating the, 143 
Dead Sea, 89 

Debtor, slavery as fate of, 199 
Decimal notation, 602 
Decius, Emperor, 457, 481, 516. 1107 
Declaration of Independence, 839, 842 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 

(Gibbon), 813-19 
Deer, 53 

Defoe, Daniel, 786, 821, 851 
Deformities, 113 
Delaware, 831, 836 

Delhi, 669, 691, 805, 806, 981, 1112, 1114 
Delian League, 264, 294 



Delos, Island of, 261, 263 

Delphi, 263, 271, 313, 337, 464 

Delphi, oracle of, 256, 270, 271 

Delphic amphictyony, 314 

Demeter (de me' ter), 316, 466 

Democracy, 259, 262, 390, 822, 844 

Demos, 259 

Demosthenes (de mos the nez), 306, 310, 
319, 329, 406, 443 

Deniker, 76 

Denmark, 81, 83, 468, 630, 720, 761, 780, 
793, 802, 816. 919, 969, 979, 1111 

Deportation, 138 

Dervishes, 683 

Descartes (da kart'), 953 

Deshima, 992 

Deuteronomy, Book of, 221 

Devon, 780 

Dewlish, 58 

Dialects, 252 

Diaspora (di as' po ra), 350, 493, 495 

Diaz (de'as), 741, 1114 

Dickens, Charles, 736 

Dicrorerus (dl kro re' r!/s), 41 

Dictator, Roman, 393 

Diderot (ded ro'), 855 

Diet (assembly). 784, 800 

Dillon, Dr., 1066-68 

Dinosaurs (dl' nd sawrz), 28, 32 

Dinothere (dl' no ther), 41 

Diocletian, 457, 488, 516, 520, 523, 1107 

Dionysius, god, 316 

Dionysius of Syracuse, 372. 401 

Diplodocus (dip lod' 6 kits), 27 

Disease, infectious, 96 

Dispensations, papal, 649, 657 

Disraeli, Benjamin. (<See Beaconsfield, 

Earl of) 
Divans, 597 
Divination, 398 
Divus Caesar, 455 
Dixon line, 829, 832 
Dnieper (ne' per) ,119, 439, 476, 480, 672, 

809 
Doctors, 178 

Dog, the, 43, 77, 81, 83, 87, 175 
Dolmens, 82 
Domazlice, 711, 1114 
Dominic, St., 658-59, 1112 
Dominican Order, 658-59, 677, 748, 991, 

1112 
Domitian, 455, 1106 
Don, river, 119, 476, 809 
Don Cossacks, 809 
Donatello, 740 
Doric dialect, 252 
Dorset, 58 



INDEX 



1141 



Dortmund, 740 

Dostoievski (dos W ef ski), 1026 

Dover, 736 

Dover, Straits of, 436 

Dragon flies, 24 

Dragonnades, 789, 803 

Dravidian civilization, 142, 147, 354, 

702; language, 124, ^35 
Dravidians, 114, 124, 128, 211, 251, 265, 

694 
Drepanum (drep' li num), 403 
Dresden, cruiser, 1042 
Dresden, battle of, 911 
Drogheda, 779 
Druids, 105 
Drums, Neolithic, 86 
Drusus, Livius, 433 
Dryopithecus (dri 6 pi the' kilts), 53 
Dubarry, Comtesse, 791 
Dublin, 1016, 1022 
Duma, the, 1047 

Dumouriez (dumoorya'). General, 875 
Dunbar, battle of, 780 
Dunce, derivation of, 729 
Dunkirk, 781 
Duns Scotus, 728, 1113 
Dupleix (du pla'), 807 
Durazzo (du rad' z6), 488, 632, 637, 

644 
Durham, University of, 964 
Diisseldorf, 54 
Dutch language, 611, 770; people, 611; 

Republic, 769-72, 918; settlements 

and seamanship, 744, 801, 830, 988, 

993. {See also Holland) 
Dwellings, Neolithic, 85 
Dyeing, 603 
Dynamics, 732 

E 

Earth, the, 1-5, 11, 43, 44 

East, orientation to, 182 

East India Company, 808, 836, 979 

Easter, feast of, 99 

Eastern lamb, 511 

Eastern (Greek) Empire. {See Byzan- 
tine Empire) 

Ebenezer, 222 

Ebro, river, 405, 407 

Ecbatana (ek bSt' d nd), 546 

Echidna (e kid'nd), 40 

Economists, French, 865 

Economus (e kon' d mws), battle of, 403, 
1105 

Eden, garden of, 953 

Edessa, 542, 643, 644 

Edom, 794 



Education, 208, 212, 213, 438, 534, 696, 
706, 724, 819, 820, 848, 901, 923, 928, 
933, 934, 948 

Edward I, 774 

Edward VI, 773, 775 

Edward VII, 783, 1013 

Edward, Prince of Wales, son of George 
V, 1022 

Egbert, 616, 618, 1110 

Eggs, 26, 39, 40, 85 - 

Egibi (ege'be), 207 

Eginhard, 623, 624 

Egmont, Count of, 770, 771 

Egypt, 80, 121, 337, 452, 489, 494-98, 
540, 567, 597, 647, 657, 699, 712, 
1109; history {early), 103, 115, 131, 
140-43, 146, UiH, 166, 172, 177, 189, 
198, 203, 209, 215, 218, 228, 232, 257, 
265-66, 271, 274, 282, 289, 290, 303, 
451, 567, 747, 1103; {and Greece). 
324, 331, 342, 1103; {and Rome), 413, 
430, 440-41, 462; {and Islam), 589, 
593, 596, 601, 628, 636, 667, 674, 682. 
685, 1112-13; {modern period), 895, 
896, 902, 979, 985, 997, 1025, 1119-20; 
Christianity in, 525, 531, 639, 708; 
Jews in, 343, 376, 496, 1114; Kingship 
in, 191-93, 205, 450; religious systems, 
144, 180-87, 191-92, 234, 324, 350, 
352, 367, 466, 513 

Egyptian language, 121 

Egyptian script, 153, 172 

Egyptian shipping, 214 

"Egyptians" (Gipsies), 697 

Elam (e'lam), 135, 268 

Elamite language, 129 

Elamites, 135, 140, 188, 327, 666 

Elba, 914 

Elections, 425, 848 

Electricity, 927, 929 

Electrum, 166 

Elephants, 43, 52, 57, 75, 153, 156, 268, 
328, 389, 403-11, 585 

Eli, judge, 222, 223 

Elixir of life, 731 

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 773, 775, 
808, 828 

Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 792, 1117 

El-lil, 136 

Emden, cruiser, 1042 

Emesa (em' e sd), 542 

Emirs, 596 

Emperor, title of, 492 

Emperors of Germany, 755 

Employers and employed, 824, 935 
I Enclosure Acts, 823-5 
I "Encyclopaedists," the, 855 



1142 



INDEX 



l<:ii}?land, 529, 628, 630, 735, 757, 960, 
996; history (early), 38, 74, 547, 605, 
614, 618, 630, 1110; {under the Nor- 
mans), 631, nil; (in the 13th and Uth 
centuries), 731, 736; (Civil war), 773, 
777-79, 829; (war with Holland), 777- 
80, 829; (war with Spain), 780; (reign 
of Charles II), 780; (in 18th century), 
780-2; (and America), 803-5; (union 
with Ireland), 1118; political and con- 
stitutional, 396, 399, 740, 767, 768, 
781-82, 785, 787; religion, 613-19, 
664, 708, 721, 761, 775, 776, 780, 
802, 829; social, 713, 795, 820, 868, 
879, 1113. (.See also Britain, Great 
Britain, and the Great War) 

English, the, 614, 630, 1108 

English language, 118, 558, 614, 718 

English seamen, 743 

Entelodont (en tel' o dont), 39 

Eoanthropus (e 6 an thro' pus), 40, 53-7. 
(See also Man) 

Eocene (e' 6 sen) period, 38-44 

Eohippus, 43 

Eolithic age, 55 

Eoliths, 51, 1102 

Ephesus (ef'e SMS), 288, 321, 511, 643 

Ephesus, Council of, 523 

Ephthalite (ef thdi lit) coins, 551 

Ephthalites, 648, 665, 1108, 1109 

Epics, 243, 245 

Epictetus (ep ik te' tws), 423 

Epicureans (ep i ku re' dns), 304, 306, 
553 

Epirus (e pi' nis), 317, 318, 386, 632 | 

Equality, 581, 842 

Equisetums (ek wi se' tilmz), 22 | 

Eratosthenes (er d tos' the nez), 10, 343, ' 
344, 348 ' 

Erech, 137 

Eretria. 281 

Erfurt, 907 

Eridu (a'ridoo), 136, 141, 156. 691 

Esarhaddon (e sdr had' on), 189, 190 
229, 269, 1103 

Essad Pasha, 1070 

Essex, 543, 605 

Esthonians, 795 

Ethiopia (and Ethiopians), 146 
325, 1103 

Ethiopian dynasty, 143, 1102 

Ethiopic language, 121 

Ethnologists, 110 

Etiquette in China, 373 

Etruria, 384 

Etruscans, 382. 383. 393, 397, 
1103-4 



193, 



ro5. 



EucHd, 343, 602 

Euphrates, 115, 136, 140, 145. 148. 155, 
181, 193, 230, 267, 437, 452, 468, 489, 
537, 542, 568. 1106 

Euripides (u rip' i dez). 299, 312, 334 

Europe, 118. 124, 127; Christianity in. 
447, 524. 531, 616, 648, 654, 659, 664, 
675, 706. 718-20, 723, 761. 785, 794, 
796, 819; common cause in, 639-41; 
Concert of, 916, 922, feudalism in, 
607 sqq., 610; history (general), 282. 
526-28, 607-8, 619. 668. 698. 737. 
757, 762, 767, 783, 786, 791, 798, 801, 
812, 818, 820, 903. 911. 914, 916-20; 
Huns in. 486, 548; Imperiahsm in. 
996-98. 1000 sqq.; industrial revolu- 
tion in. 824; intellectual development 
in, 602, 653, 706, 725, 731; languages 
of, 127; literature of, 718; "Marriage 
with Asia." 332; mechanical revolu- 
tion in, 931 sqq.; monarchy in, 765, 
771, 786-93, 801; Mongolians in, 476, 
673, 726; Moslems in, 593, 606, 612, 
628, 682, 740-43, 749, 754; natural 
political map of, 921, 971. 976. 981; 
pec5ples and races of, 76, 107, 110, 111, 
236, 475, 478, 697, 815; Powers of, 
795-97, 801, 826, 999; prehistoric, 44, 
52, 55, 57, 66, 73, 76, SO. 88, 104. 109, 
112. 118, 131, 142, 151, 177, 183, 242, 
243, 266, 267, 746; social development 
in, 700. 717, 734, 756, 767, 773, 797, 
818-22, 935, 937. (See also Great 
War) 

Europeans descended from Neolithic 
man, 78 

Euryptolemus (u rip tol' e mws). 295 

Eusebius (u se' bi ms), 522 

Evans. Sir Arthur, 117 

Evans, Sir John, 107 

Everlasting League, 754, 1113 

Evolution of the Earth, 3 

Examinations, 211, 560 

Excommunication, 645 

Executive, the, 949 

Exodus, book of, 220 

Experience, 174 

Exploration, 163 64 

"Expropriated," the, 935 

Ex votos, 177, 353 

Eylau (I'lou), battle of, 905 

Ezekiel, 231. 233 



Fabian Society. 945 
Fabius, 409-10 



NDEX 



1143 



Factories, growth of, 824 

Factory Act, 940-41, 1119 

Factory system, 931, 940 

Faizi (fa' i zi), 695 

Falkland Isles, battle of, 1042 

Family groups, 82, 131, 240 

Faraday, M., 925 

Farming, Arab knowledge of, 003 

Farrar, F. W., 456 

Fashoda (fasho'da), 985. 1025, 1120 

Fatepur-sikri (fut e poor' sik' ri), 095, 

696 
Fatima (fat' i md), 591, 628 
Fatimite caliphate, 628, 640, 685, 1111 
Fauna, early, 74 
Fausta, 520 

Faustina (faws tl' nd), 456 
Fear, 94 

Feasts, Aryan, 242 
Feathers, 30, 35 

Ferdinand I, emperor, 783, 962-63 
Ferdinand, king of Bulgaria, 1025, 1032, 

1045 
Ferdinand, king of Spain, 742, 755 
Fermentation, 242 
Ferns, 20, 22 

Ferrero (fer ra' ro), 389, 424, 432 
Fetishism, 93, 99 
Feudal system, the, 607 sqq. 
Fezzan, 88 
Fiefs, 608 

Field of the Cloth of Gold, 757 
Fielding, H., 821, 931 
Fiji, 998 

Finance, 428-30, 757, 768 
Finland (and the Finns), 476, 909, 

919 
Finland, Gulf of, 816 
Finnish language, 123 
Finno-Ugrian language, 487 
Fire, early use of, 57, 59 
Fish. 8, 19, 21, 38 
Fisher, Lord, 1048 
Fisher, Osmond, 58 
Fishing, 85 
Fiume (fu' ma). 1080 
Five Classics, the, 571 
Flame projectors, 1038 
Flanders, 631. 642 
Flavian dynasty, 455. 1106 
Flax, 85 

Fleming, Bishop, 660 
Flemings, the, 611, 645, 735 
Flemish language, 611 
Flint implements, 46, 51, 54, 57, 67, 69. 

74, 79. 85, 107 
Flood, story of the, 218, 230 



Florence. 736, 740, 750-52, 757, 790, 792, 
1114 

Florentine Society, 929 

Florida, 830 

Flowers, Cainozoic, 37 

Flying machines, 160, 730, 930 

Fontainebleau (fo« tan bio'), 904, 911 

Food, 13, 19, 61-2. 84, 1.32 

Fools, 243 

Foot of apes, men, and monkeys, 49 

Ford businesses, 942 

Forests, 77 

Fort St. Augustine, 830 

Fossils, 6, 10, 21, 33, 37, 43, 50, 954 

Foucher, 367 

"Fourteen Points," the, 1065, 1071 

Fowl, domesticated. 84, 86 

Fox, the, as food, 81 

France. 81; history (to Revolutionary 
period), 71, 163. 482-84, 527, 547, 589, 
606. 611. 613, 616, 626, 644, 651, 655, 
663. 715, 716, 725, 734-35, 749 60, 
768^70; 783-88, 794, 801, 816, 821, 
826, 1107, 1114; {Revolutionary pe- 
riod), 716, 793, 896, 1118; (Napoleonic 
period), 898, 1118; (to Great War), 
914-15. 919. 937, 965-72, 1009-10, 
1032, 1118; (Great War), 612, 1036 
sqq.; Imperialism, 998. 1025; over- 
seas dominions. 802, 826-33, 839, 977, 
992. (See also Franks, Gaul) 

Francis, St., of Assisi, 657, 720, 812, 1112 

Francis I, emperor. 1115 

Francis II, emperor, 1118 

Francis I, king of France. 755-61, 1114 

Francis Ferdinand, archduke, 1033 

Franciscan Order, 657-59, 728, 749. 
1112-13 

Frankfort. 736, 966, 1119; Peace of, 972- 
73, 1002, 1120 

Franklin, Benj., 849 

Franks, the, 480. 487, 491. 606. 610-16, 
621, 626, 634, 643, 690, 703, 1107 

Frazer, Sir J. G., 100, 102 

Frederick I (Barbarossa), emperor. 645. 
651, 653, 661, 1112 

Frederick II, emperor, 645, 647, 652, 673, 
678, 708, 719, 755, 783, 956. 1112 

Frederick III, emperor, 755 

Frederick I, king of Prussia, 791, 1116 

Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia, 
791, 798, 813, 816, 846, 1117 

Frederick III, king of Prussia, 1007 

Frederick, don, 772 

Frederick, Margraveof Brandenburg. 711 

Free discussion, 717; trade in Athens, 
394 



114.4 



INDEX 



Free intelligence, 204 

Freedom, 201, 826 

Freeman's Farm, 839 

French language, 118, 491, 611, 630, 718, 
754, 770 

Freya {hi' d), 613 

Friars, the, 722, 729. (.See also Francis- 
can Order) 

Friedland (fred'lant), battle of, 905, 
1118 

Frisian coast, 468; language, 770 

Frisians, the, 613 

Frog, the, 22 

Froissart (frwasar'), 714 

Fronde, the, 787 

Fu, S. N., 553 

Fuggers, the, 757-58, 820 

Fulas, 152 

Fulton, R., 924 

Furnace, blast, 926; electric, 926 

Future life, belief in, 93, 466 



Gaelic, 238, 1015 

Gage, General, 837, 839 

Galatia, 384, 1105 

Galatians, 337, 338, 682 

Galba, 455, 1106 

Galerius, 517, 518, 1107 

Galicia, 1040 

Galilee, 507, 510, 513, 542 

Galileo (gSl i le' 6), GaHlei, 732, 733, 952, 

1115 
Gallas, language of the, 121 
Galvani, 925 
Gama, Vasco da (vas ko' da ga' ma), 744, 

806, 1114 
Gamaliel, 511 
Gambia, 163 
Games, 264 

Gametes (gam ets'), 20 
Gandhara (gan d ha' ra), 367 
Ganesa (ga na' sha), 377 
Gang labour, 207, 226 
Ganges, 126, 147, 210,211,328,331,354, 

369, 667 
Garibaldi, 768 
Gas, 240, 556 
Gas in warfare, 1039, 1083 
Gaspee, vessel, 835 
Gath, 221 
Gaul (and the Gauls), 142, 330, 337, 384, 

392-95. 404, 407, 433-36, 439, 470, 

481, 487, 489, 527, 534, 606, 611, 626, 

815, 1105-8 
Gaulish language, 238 



Gautama (gou' ta ma). (.See Buddha) 

Gaza, 202, 221, 321, 324 

Gazelle, 43 

Gaztelu, 762 

Genesis, book of, 98, 218-21 

Geneva, 754, 813, 1074 

Genoa (jen' 6 a) and the Genoese, 640, 
644, 678, 712, 736, 739, 741, 891 

Genseric (jen'serik), 482, 1108 

Gentiles, the, 504 

Geography, 2 

Geology, '953 

Geometry, 602 

George I, 781, 782, 1116 

George II, 782, 1117 

George III, 782, 835, 1117 

George IV, 783 

George V, 770, 1013, 1022 

George, Lloyd, 1023, 1040, 1053-59, 
1068, 1072 

Georgia, 831, 836, 970, 1117 

Gerasa (jer' & so), 542 

Gerash, 544 

Gerbert (gar'ber), 602 

German language, 118, 238, 611, 718, 
770; songs and tales, 624 

Germany, 75, 81, 268; history {to Saxon 
kings), 434-36, 440, 451, 463, 468-69, 
480, 484, 524, 610-12, 616, 622, 703; 
(Saxon kings to Napoleonic period), 
627, 632. 639, 645, 651, 662, 663. 700. 
715-21, 735, 739. 744. 753-64, 767, 
770. 787. 794-97, 803-5, 814-17. 831. 
832. 833, 839, 904-5, 1111-16; {War 
of Liberation to the Great War), 911. 
919. 928, 935-38, 965-74, 994-96, 
1002; {Great War), 1023 sqq.; class 
distinction in, 209; Imperiahsm of, 
946. 1004-11, 1031 

Gethsemane, 508 

Ghent, 736. 754, 770 

Gibbon, Edward, 460-64, 485, 486, 515. 
518, 520, 529, 539, 625, 627. 632, 813- 
17, 825, 826, 854, 956 

Gibraltar, 90. 163, 461, 606, 983, 998 

Gideon, 222 

Gigantosaurus (jl gS,n to saw' riis) , 29 

Gilbert, Dr., 733, 1115 

Gilboa, Mount, 225 

Gills, 19, 21, 38 

Gin, 165 

Giotto (jot' 6), 740 

Gipsies, 697, 698 

Gipsy language, 698 

Giraffe, 43 

Girondins, 872 

Gizeh (geze'), 144, 181 



INDEX 



1145 



Glacial Age. (See Ice Age) 
Gladiators, 421, 423, 435, 458, 462. 530, 

1105 
Gladstone, \7. E., 293, 974, 1022, 1120 
Glasfurd, A. I. R., 85, 96 
Glass, 603 

Glastonbury, 83, 242 
Glaucia, 433 

Glyptodon (glip' td don), 76, 153 
Gneisenau (gnl'zenou), cruiser, 1042 
Gneiss (nis), fundamental, 6 
Gnosticism (nos' ti sism), 514, 524 
Goats in lake dwellings, 83 
Gobi Desert, 126, 473, 554, 561. 563 
God, 514, 523. 595, 732; idea of one true, 

234, 341, 363, 376, 466, 493-95, 500. 

571-73, 577, 584, 696; of Judaism, 305 

sqq.. 350, 581; Kingdom of, 498, 662. 

677, 708, 796 
Godfrey of Bouillon, 642, 770. 1111 
Gods, 178, 180, 185, 188, 351; Aryan. 

256; Egyptian, 180-83, 191-94; 

Greek, 256, 305; Japanese, 367; 

tribal, 104, 283 
Goethe, 869 

Gold, 78, 88, 465, 653, 888 
Golden Horde, the, 694, 809 
Goldsmith, Oliver, y21, 1017, 1068 
Golgotha, 508 

Good Hope, Cape of, 806, 979, 1114 
Good Hope, cruiser, 1042 
Goods, consumable, 889 
Gorham, Nathaniel, 846 
Gorilla, 47, 163 
"Gorillas," 184 
Goshen, land of, 220 
Gospels, the, 497, 499, 507-11, 516, 523, 

709, 954 
Gotha (go' ta), aeroplane, 1041 
Gothic architecture, 736; language, 238 
Goths, 457, 472, 476, 481, 487-91, 527, 

530, 532, 536, 606, 610, 631, 1107-8 
Gough, General, 1050 
Government, 185, 397, 706, 922 
Gracchi, the, 432, 707 
Gracchus, Caius, 431, 1105 
Gracchus, Tiberius, 427-31, 1105 
Grain, as food, 84, 87, 134 
Granada, 742 
Grand Remonstrance, 777 
Granicus (grd nV kils), battle of the. 321, 

1104 
Grape, 242 
Graphite, 7 
Grasses, 37, 43 
Gravelotte (gravlof), 972 
Gr<iv<>send, 780 



Gravitation, law of, 733 

Gray, G. B.. 220 

Great Britain, history (general), 795. 
997; (and India), 69.3-96, 805-9; (an I 
America) 802, 805, 823, 827-28. 833- 
34; (and French Revolution), 873, 876; 
(in Napoleonic period), 894-96, 902, 
904, 908, 1117; (u;ar with Turkey), 920; 
(Crimean war), 967; (suspicion of 
Russia), 973; (in alliance against Ger- 
many), 1008-9; (the Great War), 1033 
sqq., (effect of Great War on), 1053 
sqq.; constitutional, political, and 
social, 426, 821-22, 844, 865, 883, 927, 
936, 1011, 1118-19; expansion and Im- 
perialism, 797, 977-87, 991, 996. 997, 
1011-23, 1120. (See also Britain and 
England) 

Great Exhibition, the. 964, 1119 

Great Mogul, 805, 808 

Great ox. (See Aurochs) 

Great Schism. (.See Papal Schism) 

Great War, the, 613, 725, 775, 785. 
1033 sqq., 1120 

Greatness, 849 

Greece (and the Greeks), 65, 80. 85, 221, 
263-68, 381-82, 703, 718. 746; history 
(to war with Persia), 158-62. 177, 221, 
252 sqq., 1103; (war with Persia), 
263, 275. 278-90. 1104; (to I5th cen- 
tury), 292, 301, 306, 310-16, 320, 324, 
337, 384, 480, 541. 552, 643, 662, 
682-85, 1113; (modern), 920, 1025, 
1119; civilization, 254-65, 307, 389, 
423, 542. 1043, 1045; constitutional, 
256-65, 304-7, 313, 320, 389; religion, 
185, 255-56, 316, 350, 612; thought 
and learning, 248, 303-6, 340^3, 419, 
557, 600 

Greek alphabet, 172; archipelago, 89, 
202; Church, 525, 538. 622, 624, 637- 
38, 643-45, 661, 920, 1108; language 
and literature, 118, 140, 2.38, 43, 
252-54, 297, 300, .306, 310, 342, 350, 
459, 463, 489, 510, 536, 543, 596, 
599, 614; warfare, 624, 718 

Greek (Eastern) Empire, see Eastern 
(Greek) Empire 

Green, J. R., 713 

Green flag, 628 

Greenland, 55, 618, 741 

"Greens," faction of the, 797 

Gregory, Sir R. A., 733 

Gregory I. t'le Great, 534, 561, 605, 614, 
660. 712, 725, 1109 

Gregory VII, 637, 638, 648, 660, 709, 
725, 1111 



1146 



INDEX 



Gregory IX, 647, 651, 708, 1112 

Gregory XI, 663, 687, 1113 

Grey, Sir Edward, 1033 

Grey Friars. {See Franciscan Order) 

Grimaldi race, 67, 72, 89 

Grimm's Law, 118 

Grisons, 491 

Grote, 299 

Growth, 13 

Guadalquivir (gaw ddtl kwiv' §r), 744 

Guianas, the, 979 

Guilds, 209 

Guillemard, 744 

Guillotine, 878 

Guiscard (ges kar'), Robert, 632, 644, 

1111 
Gulf Stream, 17 
Gum-tree, 37 

Gunpowder, 556, 670, 735, 817 
Guptas (goop' ids), 549 
Gurkhas, 981 

Gustavus Adolphus, 786, 802 
Gutenberg, 717 
Guthrum, 618, 1111 
Gwalior, 806 
Gyges (gl'jez), 266, 1103 



H 



Haarlem (har'lem). 770, 772, 1114 
Habsburgs, 662, 700, 754-57, 783, 786, 

794, 799, 913, 914 
Hackett, 955 
Hadrian, 455, 464, 1107 
Hadrian, tomb of, 606 
Hadrian's wall, 455 
Hague Conferences, 1001 
Haig, Sir Douglas, 1045 
Hair, 34, 40 
Halicarnassus (hal i kdir nas' lis), 202, 

204, 289, 321, 324 
Hall, 164 

Ham, son of Noah, 110 
Hamburg, 736, 739 
Hamilcar, 404, 407 
Hamilton, Alexander, 849 
Hamilton, Sir William, 927 
Hamites, 125, 148, 187 
Hamitic languages, 121, 128, 129; ships, 

158 
Hammond, 819 
Hammurabi (ham moo ra' be), 138, 142, 

145, 147, 188, 200, 218, 327, 1103 
Han dynasty, 151, 195, 212, 371, 439, 

470, 472, 475, 550, 1107 
Hancock, 837 ^i 

Hang Chau (hang'chou), 669, 1111 



Hannibal, 405-10, 415 

Hanno, 142, 163-67, 177, 184, 405, 439, 

461, 741, 1104 
Hanover, 882 

Hanover, elector of. (.See George I) 
Hanoverian dominions, 795 
Hanoverian dynasty, 782, 787 
Hansa towns, 739-44 
Hanse merchants, 816 
Harcourt, Sir William, 946 
Hare, the, 84 
Hariti, 366 
Haroun-al-Raschid (ha roon al ra' shed), 

596, 598, 625, 1110 
Harpagos (har' pd£ gds), 272 
Harpalus (har'pdWs), 318, 329 
Harpoons, 69 
Harran, 543 
Harris, H. Wilson, 1074 
Harvey, John, 733, 1115 
Hasan, son of Ali, 592, 596 
Hasdrubal, 405-9 
Hastings, Warren, 808, 979, 1011 
Hatasu (ha' ta soo). Queen of Egypt, 146 
Hathor, 182, 192, 351, 352 
Hatra, 543 
Hatred, 405 
Hauran, 544, 568 
Hawk gods, 180 
Hearths, 242 
Heaven, Kingdom of, 498, 501, 506, 510, 

952. {See also God) 
Hebert, 879 

Hebrew language, 120, 494, 496; litera- 
ture, 232; prophets, 522; thought, 

305; moral teaching, 164. {See also 

Jewish) 
Hebrews, 188, 220-23, 568. (.Sec also 

Jews) 
Hecati3eus (hek d te' Us), 166 
Hector, 245 
Hedgehogs, 43 

Hegira (hej' i rd), 573, 577, 582, 1109 
Heidelberg man, 52, 54, 63 
Hekt, 182 
Helen of Troy, 161 
Helena, Empress, 539, 646 
Helena, mother of Constantine, 520 
Heligoland, 1008, 1120 
Heliolithic (he li d lith' ik) culture, 112, 

115, 128, 132, 142, 148, 153-59, 168, 

242, 354, 746, 991 
Heliolithic peoples, 152 
Heliopolis (he li op' 6 lis), (Baalbek), 542 
Hellenes, 252 
Hellenic civilization, 254 sqq., 589, 726; 

t idition, 491 



INDEX 



1147 



Hellenism, 368, 494 

Hellespont, 282, 287-88, 306, 314, 321, 

451, 541, 585, 643, 697, 1104, 1109 
Helmolt, H. F., 404, 584, 588, 696 
Helmont, van, 240 
Helots, 256 

Hen. (See Fowl, domesticated) 
Henriot, 880 

Henry II, German Emperor, 626 
Henry V, German Emperor, 627 
Henry VI, German Emperor, 651 
Henry II, King of England, 1014 
Henry III, King of England, 774 
Henry V, King of England, 735 
Henry VII, King of England, 742, 773, 

775 
Henry VIII, King of England, 753, 755, 

759, 760, 773, 775, 1115 
Henry of Prussia, Prince, 846 
Henry the Fowler, 627, 635 
Henry, Patrick, 834, 849 
Hephsestion (he fes' ti on), 334, 440 
Heraclea (herakle'a), 387, 1105 
Heraclius (her ak' li its), 536, 539, 544, 

555, 567, 583-85, 646, 1109 
Heraldry, 209 
Herat, 328, 525 
Herbivorous animals, 28, 29 
Hercules, demi-god, 341, 445 
Hercules, son of Alexander, 336 
Hercules, temple of, 177 
Herdsmen, 206, 208 
Hereditary rule, 703 
Heredity, 175 
Heretics, 658 
Heristhal, 612 
Hermon, Mount, 85, 131 
Heme Island, 163 
Hero, 343, 468 
Herodes Atticus (her 6' dez at' i kws), 

464 
Herodians, 503 
Herodotus (he rod' o tits), 132, 163, 166, 

184, 202, 209, 234, 264, 268-74, 281, 

287, 290, 294, 298, 300, 341, 345, 427, 

461, 536, 561, 585, 1104 
Herods, the, 495, 498, 503 
Herophilus (he rof i Iws), 343 
Herzegovina (hert se gov' e nn), 1009, 

1120 
Hesperornis (hes per or' nis), 35 
Hesse (hes' e) and Hessians, 616, 760, 

971 
Hezekiah, King, 229 
Hieratic script, 173 
Hiero (hi' c"r o), 401, 403, 408 
Hieroglyphics, 154-57, 173 



Hieronymus (hi ^r on' i miXs) of Syra- 
cuse, 408 

Hildebrand. (See Gregory VII) 

Himalayas, 38, 126, 474 

Hindu deities, 374, 376; priests, 249; 
schools, 696 

Hindu Kush, 693 

Hindus, 211, 240, 248, 467, 694, 697, 
806 

Hindustan, 669, 693 

Hipparchus, 342 

Hippias, 280 

Hippo, 484, 525 

Hippopotamus, 26, 52, 57 

Hippopotamus deities, 144, 180 

Hira, 584, 585 

Hiram, King of Sidon, 225-27 

Hirth, 373, 506 

Histiseus, 278, 289, 489 

Hittites, 138, 142, 146, 165, 218, 221, 
222, 240, 275 

Hi-ung-nu. (See Huns) 

Hague, cruiser, 1042 

Hoheulinden, battle of, 624 

Hoheustaufens (ho en stou' fen), 627, 
662, 739, 754, 783 

Hohenzollerns, 786, 791, 913, 969, 972, 
1004 

Holland, 469, 527, 616, 717, 739, 744, 
749, 771, 773, 779, 780, 786, 802, 806, 
830, 877, 883, 891, 903-4, 911, 979, 
984, 1119 

Holly, 37 

Holstein, 919 

Holy Alliance, 915, 916, 920, 937, 1000, 
1002 

Holy Land. (.See Crusades and Pales- 
tine) 

Holy Roman Empire, 623, 628, 632, 690, 
739, 754, 757, 764, 767, 805, 1118 

Homage, 609 

Home Rule Bill, 262 

Homer, 85, 164, 173, 252, 437 

Homo antiquus. (.See Neanderthal man; 
Heidelbergensis, see Heidelberg man; 
Neanderthalensis, see Neanderthal 
man; primigenius, see Neanderthal 
man; apiens, see Man, true) 

Homs, 542 

Honduras (hon dur' as), British, 803 

Honey, 243 

Honoria, 484 

Honorius, 481 

Honorius III, pope, 651, 1112 

Hopf, Ludwig, 100 

Tiophni, 223 

. ^rn, Count of, 770, 771 



1148 



INDEX 



Horn implements, 69, 79 

Horrabin, F., 89 

Horses, 43, 48, 52, 70, 135, 239, 241, 
459 

Horticulture, 196 

Horus, 191, 195, 351, 353, 367, 513 

Hotel Cecil, 542 

Hottentot language, 129 

Households, growth of, 199 

Houses, stone, 242 

Howard, the philanthropist, 882 

Hrdlicka, Dr., 76 

Hsia, Empire of, 672 

Hue, 367 

Hudson Bay Company, 803 

Hudson Bay Territory, 125 

Hudson River, 839, 924 

Hugo, Victor, 899 

Huguenots, 795, 803, 830 

Hulagu. 674, 678, 680, 691, 713, 1113 

Human association, 949 

Human sacrifice, 87, 100, 747 

Hungary (and the Hungarians), 79, 481, 
487, 521, 616, 635, 642, 663, 673, 683, 
687, 699, 740, 759-60, 784, 809, 918, 
937, 973, 1114. (Sec also Austria) 

Huns, 150-52, 195, 330, 439, 462, 468, 
472-82, 484, 487, 548, 553, 563, 635, 
667, 669, 673, 702, 815, 1108 

Hunter Commission, 982 

Hunting, 70, 76, 84, 94, 267 

Husein, son of Ali, 592, 595 

Hubs, John, 664, 710, 758. 812, 821, 
1113 

Hussites, 711, 715, ^113 

Hut urns. 86 

Hutchinson, 129 

Hutton, 954 

Huxley, Prof., Ill, 955 

Hwang-ho (hwang'ho), river, 151, 470, 
679 

Hysena, cave, 57 

Hyaenodon (hi e' no don), 39 

Hyde Park. 964 

Hyksos, 142, 145, 567 

Hyracodon (hi rak' o don). 39 

Hystaspes (his tas' pez), 274, 1104 



Iberian language, 236 

Iberians, 74. 111. 142. 158, 221, 236, 
241, 246, 381. (See also Mediterra- 
nean race) 

Ibex, 71 

Ibn Batuta (ibn ba too' ta), 713 

Jbn-rushd. (.See Averroes) 



Ibrahim, son of Muhammad, 579 

Icarus (ik' d nis), 161 

Ice, effect of, 44 

Ice Age, 38, 43, 45, 51, 56, 62, 125, 267 

Iceland, 618, 741. 802 

Icelandic language, 238 

Ichabod, 223 

Ichthyosaurs (ik' thi d sawrz), 28, 32 

Iconium, 636 

Ideograms, 160, 170 

Ideographs, 173 

Idumeans, 494 

Ignatius, St., of Loyola, 722, 724, 812, 
1114, 1115 

Iliad, the. (See Homer) 

Ilkhan, Empire of, 680, 687 

Illyria, 314, 317, 320, 404, 412, 682, 1104 

Immortality, idea of, 352, 362, 467 

Imperator, title of, 492 

Imperial preference, 1011- 3 

Imperialism, 261, 959, 962, 988, 989 
1000 sqq., 1023-24 

Implements, bronze, 101; Chellean, 52; 
copper, 79; earliest use of, 51; flint, 
54, 57, 61, 67, 69, 85; horn, 69, 79; 
iron, 80; Neolithic, 77, 78, 86, 100; 
Palajohthic, 56, 77. 107; Pliocene, 51- 
3; stone, 50, 60, 77, 78, 215; use of 
by animals, 51; wooden, 57 

Inca of Peru, 746 

India. 81, 85. 152. 251. 275. 338, 369, 421, 
439, 461, 475, 547, 592, 598, 669, 691, 
698, 703,817, 895; history (Alexander 
in), 320, 328, 332, 367, 439; (Indo- 
Scythians in), 474; 549, 1107; (Eph- 
thalites in), 548, 1107; (Mongols in), 
476, 675, 697; (17th and 18th cen- 
turies), 805-7,811; (British in) , GM, 
806-9, 827, 834, 977-82, 991, 997, 
1011, 1117-19; civilization, social de- 
velopment and culture 111, 142, 147, 
210-14, 248, 257, 354. 368. 697, 704, 
981; European settlements in, 805-9, 
827, 834, 1117; languages of, 124, 239, 
698; peoples and races, 107-9, 111, 
125, 126, 142, 265, 329. 550. 667. 747; 
religions of. 378. 524. 545. 669, 675, 
697, 724; trade of, 342, 462. 806; 
travels and voyages to. 462, 561-62, 
679, 741-44, 990, 1108, 1114 

Indian corn. 85 

Indian ocean. 81, 87, 156, 743 

Indians, American. (.See American In- 
dians) 

Indies, East, 32, 115, 125, 128, 153, 156, 
214, 806, 979, 988 

Indies, West. 743, 802, 852, 979 



INDEX 



1149 



Individual, the free, 201 
Individuality, in reproduction, 13 
Indo-European languages. (See Aryan 

languages) 
Indo-Iranian language, 238; people, 466 
Indore, 806 

Indo-Scythians, 475, 538, 549, 1106 
Indulgences, 657, 758 
Indus, 126, 251, 275, 327, 331, 337, 368, 

436, 451, 691, 1104 
Industrial Revolution, 8^5, 931-34, 941 
Industrialism, 823 
Infanticide, 104 
Influenza, 922 
Information, 948 
Inge, Dean, 507, 951 
Innes, A. D., 773 
Innocent III, pope, 646, 647, 651, 661, 

725, 1112 
Innocent IV, 646, 652, 677 
Inns, early, 166 
Innsbruck, 762 

Inquisition, the, 659, 723, 764, 916 
Insects, 3, 21, 23 

Instruments, Neolithic musical, 86 
Interglacial period, 43, 51, 52, 55, 57 
"International," the, 945 
International relationship, 891 
Internationalism, 960 
Intoxicants, 242, 251 
Investitures, 609, 638, 649 
Ion, poet, 295 
lona, 614 

Ionian Islands, 894 

lonians, 264, 265, 275, 279, 285, 288, 682 
Ipsus (ip'siis), battle of, 237 
Irak, 598 

Iran (e ran'), 437, 547 
Iranians, 548 
Ireland, 65, 78. 82, 155, 251, 262, 524, 

605, 614, 631, 661, 735, 779-81, 958, 

960, 997, 1011-23, 1119-20 
Irish Catholics, 777 79, 795; language, 

119, 238; prisoners, 831; race, 238 
Irish sea, 55 
Iron, 2, 59; as currency, 165; use of, 80, 

134, 151. 153, 824, 924-27, 1103 
Iron Age, 80 
Ironsides, 778 

Iroquois (ir 6 kwoi') tribes, 832 
Irrigation, 136 
Irving, Washington, 803 
Isaac, patriarch, 218 20 
Isabella of Castile. 742. 755 
Isaiah. 502 

Ishmael, 220 * 

Ishtar, 188 



Isis, 182, 192, 351-52. 367, 466. 467, 499. 
512-13 

Iskender, 331 

Islam, 235, 379, 506, 557, 570 sqq., 702, 
750; and Christianity, 599, 628, 675, 
708; propaganda of, 581, 594. 616, 
675. 687, 706, 805, 933 34; teaching 
of, 579 sqq., 628, 697, 705, 939. {See 
also Moslems, and Muhammadanism) 

Isocrates (I sok' rd t6z), 298, 300, 307, 
310, 331, 340 

Ispahan (is pa han'), 691 

Israel, Kingdom of (and Israelites), 139, 
217 sqq., 266. 704. 795, 1102. {See also 
Jews) 

Issik Kul (is'ikkool), 562 

Issus, battle of, 322, 326. 585, 642, 1104 

Italian language, 118. 381, 754 

Italy (and Italians), 78. 142, 158, 221, 
380, 382, 454, 533, 682, 703. 1105; his- 
tory {Greeks in), 253, 294, 382, 385-87, 
ll()4-5; {Gauls in), 330, 385, 404; 
{Roman), 387, 394, 425, 430-35, 451, 
706; {invasion by Hannibal), 408-10; 
{Goths in), 480, 527, 610, 631, 1108; 
{Huns in), 486; {Lombards in), 527, 
537, 621, 712, 1110; {Charlemagne in), 
621-22; {Germans in), 623, 1114; {Nor- 
mans in), 631, 632, 640; {Saracens 
in), 632; {Magyars in), 632; {13th-18th 
cent.), 647, 651, 653, 662, 685-87. 739, 
750-52, 758,768.785-91,1114; {Na- 
poleonic period), 786, 883, 890, 894-95, 
902, 906, 1118; {to unification of), 
618-19, 936-38, 960; {Kingdom of), 
968-72. 992, 996, 1025, 1041, 1120; 
imperialism of, 996, 1025. (See also 
Rome and Great War) 

Ivan III, 689, 1114; IV {the Terrible), 
689, 1115 

Ivory, trade in, 214 

Ivy, fossil, 37 

J 

Jacob, patriarch, 218 sq. 

Jacobins, French, 869. 877 sqq., 887, 

893, 1118 
Jacquerie, 715, 1026, 1113 
Jade, 88 
Jaffa, 896 

Jaipur (jlpoor'), 805 
Jamaica, 803, 979, 998 
James I, 82, 768, 788, 803, 828 
James II, 781, 1015 
James, St., 503 
James, Henry, 1065 
Jameson, Dr., 958 



1150 



INDEX 



Jamestown. 832. 851 
Janissaries. 683. 691 
Japan, 109, 367, 371, 679, 742-44, 811, 

992-94, 1119-20 
Japanese. 4"9. 990 

Japanese language and writing. 121, 558 
Japhet, 110 
Jarandilla. 762 
Jarrow, 614 
Java, 51, 743 
Jaw, chimpanzee, 54; human, ib. Pilt- 

down {see Piltdown) 
Jefferson, The, 840, 849 sqq. 
Jehad (jehad'), "holy war," 645 
Jehan (jehan'), Shah, 693 
Jehangir, 693 

Jehovah, 222, 226, 230. 257. 351 
Jena (ya' no), battle of. 905, 907, 1004, 

1118 
Jengis Khan (jen' gis kan), 667, 669 sq., 

675 sq., 681, 688 sqq., 809, 1112 
Jerome of Prague, 710 
Jerusalem, 191, 217, 226-33, 350, 452, 

495, 502, 503, 507, 511, 525, 539, 544, 

586, 588, 628, 639, 642-47, 661, 679, 

1007, 1109, 1111 
Jesuits, 678, 687, 722, 749, 928, 991, 1113 

sq. 
Jesus, spirit and teaching of, 234, 423, 

496 sqq., 522, 539, 547, 572, 578 sqq., 

619, 628, 649, 654 .•<qq.. 67Z, 687, 708, 

sq., 716, 721, 812, 843, 886, 902, 939, 

952, 1106 sq. 
Jewellery, iron, 80 
Jewish religion and sacred books, 218, 

233, 234, 341, 350, 376, 466, 495, 

499, 600, 953 
Jews. 146, 191, 217. 230-35, 254, 342, 

352, 493-95, 530, 568-74, 584, 594, 

597, 600, 606, 635. 652, 682, 706, 793, 

798, 1106. {See also Judaism) 
"Jingo," 973 
Jingo, queen, 991 
Joab, 226 
Joan of Arc, 735 
Job, Book of, 85, 232 
Jodhpore (jod poor'), Raja of, 695 
John, King of England. 645 
John II, king of Portugal, 742 
John III, king of Poland. (See Sobiesky, 

John) 
John VI, pope, 660 
John X. pope, 627, 1111 
John XI, pope, 627, 1111 
John XII, pope, 627, 637, 660, 1111 
John, Prester, 679 
John, St., 503; Gospel of, 497, 614 



Johnson, Samuel, 1017 

Jones, H. Stuart, 446, 463 

Joppa, 221 

Jordan, river, 218, 584 

Joseph, St., 498 

Joseph II, emperor, 792. 1117 

Josephine, empress. {Sec Beauharnais) 

Josephus. 430, 494 sq. 

Joshua, 221 

Josiah, king of Judah, 299, 1103 

Judah, kingdom of, 227, 794 

Judaism, 378, 493, 581, 702, 708. (See 
also Jews) 

Judas, 508 

Judea, 142, 217, 308, 376, 466, 494 sqq., 
507 sqq., 570, 592 

Judges, Book of, 222 sq. 

Judges of Israel, 400, 704 

Jugo-Slavs (u'goslavz). (.See Yugo- 
slavs) 

Jugurtha (joo ger' tha). 432 sq., 1105 

Julian, the Apostate, 546, 1106 

Julius III, 763 

Jung, 304 

Jungle fo I, 85 

Juno, 163 

Junot, Mme., 893 

Jupiter, 351 sq., 383, 613 

Jupiter, planet, 2 

Jupiter Serapis, 351 

Justinian, 527 sq., 554, 610, 621 sq., 712, 
922, 1108 

Jutes, 482, 526, 619 

Jutland, battle of, 1042 



Kaaba (ka' a bd), 569 sqq., 577, 592 

Kadessia, battle of, 585, 1109 

Kadija (ka de' ja), 570 sqq. 

Kaffirs, 164 

Kaisar-i-Hlnd, 492, 694 

Kaisar-'i-Roum, 492 

Kaiser, Austrian, 492; German, 492 

Kali (ka'le), 377 

Kalifa. {See Caliph) 

KaUnga, 369 

Kalmucks (kal' muks), 107. 113. 473, 688 

Kanishka (ka nish' ka), 549, 564, 1107 

Kao-chang, 563 

Karakorum (ka ra kor' dm), 672 sqq., 694 

Karma (kar' md), doctrine of, 363 

Karnak, 146 

Kashgar (kashgar'), 474, 549, 562, 588, 

670, 679 
Kashmir, Buddiiists in, 371 
Kavadh, 545, 555, 567, 909, 1109 



INDEX 



1151 



Kazan (kazan'), 678 

Keane, A. H., 127 

Keith, Dr. A., 53 sq. 

Keltic languages, 238, 251, 381, 527 

Keltic race, 142, 238, 330, 337, 482, 605, 
770, 1014 

Kent, Duke of, 941 

Kent, Kingdom of, 605 

Kepler, 732 

Kerensky, 1047 

Kerne Island, 163 

Ketboga, 691 

Keynes, J. M., 1076 

Khalid (ka led'), 584 sq. 

Khans, 563, 674 .sqq., GHHsqq., 704, 11126g. 

Kharismia, 667, 670, 1112 

Khazars (kazarz'). 635 

Khedive, the, of Egypt, 997 

Khitan people, 669, 679 

Khiva (ke' va), 669, 679 

Khokand (ko kand'), 474, 670 

Khorasan (ko'rasan'), 596, 602 

Khotan (ko tan'), 549, 679, 1107 

Khyber Pass, 328, 475, 562, 806 

Kiau-Chau (kyou' chou'), 996 sq., 1080, 
1120 

Kidnapped children sent to New Eng- 
land, 831 

Kieff, 631, 689, 694, 1110; Grand Duke 
of, 672 

Kin Empire, 669 sq., 688, 811, 1111 

Kings, Book of, 140, 222, 225, 229 

Kings (and kingship), 104, 185, 197 sqq., 
205 sqq., 223, 247 sqq., 255 sq., 368, 703, 
750, 785, 833, 916 sq.; divine right of, 
774, 777 

Kioto (kyo'to), 993 

Kipchak, Empire, 674, 688 sq. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 957, 988, 1012 

Kirghis (kirgez'), 670; steppe, 554 

Kitchen-middens, 81, 83, 119 

Kiwi, 153 

Knighthood, 398, 757 

Knights, 209, 736; of the Shire, 397, 774 

Knives, flint, 79 

Knots, records by means of, 154 

Knowledge, diffusion of, 340, 499 

Konia, 636 

Konigsberg, 736, 910 

Koran, 574 sq., 581, 594 sq., 806 

Korea, 558 sg., 811, 991 

Korean alphabet, 559; language, 123 

Kosciusko (kos i us' ko), 801 

Krapina, 54 
Kremlin, the, 792 
Kri.shna (krish' nf<), 377 
Kriidener, Baroness von, 915 



Krum, Prince of Bulgaria, 623, 634, 1110 

Krupp, firm of, 1037 

Kshatriyas (ksha tre' yaz), 211 

Kuan-yin, 307 

Kublai Khan (koo' bll kan), 674 sq\, 

687 .sq., 704, 1113 .sq. 
Kuen-lun (kwen loon') mountains, 147, 

474, 562 
Kufa, 601 

Kushan (koo shan') dynasty, 549 
Kusinagara, 565 
Kut, 1044 
Kutub, 669, 1112 

L 

Labour, 197, 207, 213, 747, 942, 1003 

Labour Colleges, 419 

Lal)ourers, Statute of, 715 

Labrador, 58, 94, 107, 962 

Labyrinth, Cretan, 159-62 

Lacedemon (las e de' mdn), 254 

Lacedemonians, 258, 271, 281 

Lade, 279 

Ladrones (la dronz'), 743 

Ladysmith, 417 

Lafayette (la'fayef), General, 839, 
860-63, 869, 872 

Lagash (la'ga,sh), 141 

Lahore, 670 

Lake dwellings, 82, 87, 103. (.See also 
Pile dwellings) 

Lamas, Grand, 368 

Lamballe, princess de, 875 

Lamps, Palteolithic, 74 

Lance head, bronze, 101 

Land, tenure of, 197, 213 - 

Lang, Andrew, 59 

Langley, Prof., 930 

Languages of mankind, 97, 103, 117, 129, 
135, 172, 238, 243, 381 

Laodicea (la o di se' d), 643 

Lao Tse (la'otze), 371, 375, 505, 553, 

566, 667, 939, 1104 
Lapland, 123 
Larsa, 141 

Las Casas (las ka' sas), 748, 851 
Lateran, the, 622, 628, 637, 648, 654-55. 

661 
Latin emperors, 662, 783; language and 
literature, 137, 236, 395, 459. 463, 489- 
91, 526, 535, 611, 625, 635-36, 690, 719 
Latins, the, 381-83, 1106-9 
Latium, 382 
Laud, Archbishop, 776 
Lav/, 260, 536, 610 
Lawrence, General, 981 
League of Nations, 1064-65, 1072-78, 1121 



1152 



INDEX 



Learning, 184, 675 

Leather, Arabian, 603; money, 165, 653 

Lebanon, 226, 542, 544 

Lecointre (le kwantr'), 863 

Lee, General, 847, 971 

Leeuwenhoek (la' ven huk), 733 

Legge, 353, 467 

Legion of Honour, 900 

Leicestershire, 715 

Leiden, 770 

Leipzig (lip' sik), 736; battle of, 911 

Leipzig, cruiser. 1042 

Lemberg, 1040 

Lemming, 44 

Le Moustier, 58 

Lemurs, 43, 49 

Lena, river, 816 

Lenin (len'in), 946-48, 1048 

Leo I, 487; III, 622, 624, 660, 1125; 

X, 755-58, 1 1 14 
Leo the Isaurian, 594 
Leonidas (le on' i das), 284 
Leopold I, of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, 920, 

963, 1119 
Leopold, king of Belgium, 965 
Lepanto, battle of, 700, 742 
Lepers, 657 

Lepidus (lep' i dus), 444 
Levant, the, 749 
Levantine lake, 155 
Leverhulme, Lord, 942 
Levites, 226 
Leviticus, Book of, 221 
Lex Valeria, 391 
Lexington, 824, 1117 
Lhassa, 326, 373 
Liang-chi-chao, 151 
Liao-tung (le ou' toong'), 994 
Liberal Party, 1013 
Liberia, 163, 986 
Libraries, 231, 344 
Libyan script, 173 
Licinian Rogations and Laws, 393, 430, 

552 
Licinius, 393 
Li^ge (liazh'), 1037 
Liegnitz (leg' nits), battle of, 673, 1112 
Life, 3, 14, 35; early forms of, 3-12, 18- 

24, 25; intellectual development of 

human, 173-76 
Light, essential to plants, 20 
Ligny (lenye'), 914 
Ligurian republic, 891 
Lilybaeum, 402 
Limerick, Treaty of, 1015 
Lincoln, Abraham, 293, 969, 1119 
Lion, the, 51, 56, 75, 248, 267 



Lippi, Filippo, 740 

Lisbon, 45S, 644, 736, 743, 762, 806 

Lissa, battle of, 972 

Literature, prehistoric, 243 

Lithuania. 689, 795 

Liu Yu, 554 

Liverpool, 924, 1119 

Lizards, 32 

Llama, 42, 153 

Lloyd, 294 

Lloyd, L., 243 

Lob Nor, 679 

Lochau (16 ch6u'), 761 

Locke, John, 833, 855. 1116 

Lockyer, Sir Norman, 183 

Logic, study of, 726 

Loire (Iwar), the, 611 

Lombardy (and Lombards), 491, 527, 

529, 533, 537, 610, 621, 712, 772, 904. 

968, 1109 
London, 713-14, 736, 739, 777, 799, 808, 

836, 905, 913, 935, 963, 996, 1016. 

lOtl, 1051, 1119 
London, Royal Society. (.See Royal 

Society of London) 
London, University of, 964 
Londonderry, 1021-23, 1120 
Longinus (Ion ji' n?/s), 464 
Long Island Sound, 828 
Longwy (Ion ve'), 873 
Loos. 1040 
Lopez de Recalde, Inigo. {See Ignatius, 

St., of Loyola) 
Lords, House of, 398, 420, 775, 779-82. 

787, 844 
Lorraine, 972-73, 1012 
Lost Ten Tribes, 138 
Louis the Pious, 612, 625 26, 1110 
Louis VII, 644; IX. 648, 677. 1112; XL 

735; XIV, 781,787-89, 792, 798. 803, 

857, 876, 899; XV, 791, 794-95, 813, 

900,1117; XVI, 791-94, 816, 849, 857 

sqq., 882, 913; XVH. 913; XVIH, 

913, 1117-18 
Louis Philippe, 917, 1118 
Louisiana, 805, 833 
Louvain University, 1068 
Loyalty, modern conceptions of, 958 
Loyola (loio'lfi), St. {See Ignatius, 

St., of Loyola) 
Lu, 372 
Lubbock, Sir John. (.See Avebury, 

Lord) 
Lubeck, 739 
Lucerne, Lake of, 754 
Lu-chu Islands, 552 
Lucknow, 805, 981 



NDEX 



1153 



Lucretius (lu kre' shi (fs), 419, 462, 0").} 
Lucullus (l^u kill' i(s), 436 
Luke. St., 497 
Lunar month, 99 
Lung-fish, 21 
Lungs, 22, 42 
"Lur," bronze, 101 
Lusitanin, liner, 1042 
Luther, Martin, 719-23, 758, 761, 1114 
Lutterworth, 660 
Lutzen (luf sen), 786 
Lutzow, Count, 711 
Luxembourg, 972, 1034 
Luxembourg Palace, 897 
Luxor, 146, 192 
Lvoflf, Prince, 1047 
Lyceum, Athens, 301, 303 
Lycia, sea-battle of, 593 
Lycurgus (ll k6r' gus), 166 
Lydia (and Lydians), 165, 264-66. 269 
sqq., 274, 314. 337, 355, 413. 682. 1103 
Lydian language, 128; script, 171 
Lyell, Sir C, 952 
Lyons, 488, 878 
Lysimachus (li simVi ki/s). 337 



M 



Macaulay. Lord. 384, 819-20 

Macaulay Island, 162 

Maccabeans, 495, 570 

Macedon, 543 

Macedonia (and the Macedonians), 158, 

253, 259, 279, 288. 306. 311, 328. 332. 

336. 342, 369. 387. 408. 412. 568. 608. 

682. 705, 817. 917. 1104 
Machiavelli (makeavel'e). N., 751. 

758,765,792. 1004. 1114 
Machinery, 824, 932 
Madagascar, 153 
Madeira, 741 
Madhurattha Vilasini (mad' hoc rat'- 

t'ha vi la' si ne), 360 
Madison, 849 
Madras. 249. 369. 702. 807 
Maeander (me Jin' der). 643 
Maslius. Spurius, 392, 431 
Magdalenian Age, clothiii,";, 347; liiiii 

ters, 267 
Magdeburg, 736. 786 
Magellan, Ferdinand, 74!, 1114 
Magenta, 968, 1119 
Magic and ma.'^icians. 104, 178 
Magna Carta, 774, 1112 
Magna Gracia. 253. 266. 385, 386 
Magnesia. 338, 413, 1105 
Magnetism, 733 



Magyar language, 173, 487, 635 

Magyars (majarz'), 487, 527, 632. 673 

Mahaffy, 301, 331 

Mahrattas. 805 

Maillard. 862 

Maimonides (ml mon' i dez), 600 

Maine. 829-31 

Mainz (mints). 624, 717 

Maize, 85, 153 

Majuba, 986, 1013, 1120 

Malabar, 462 

Malay-Polynesian languages, 124 

Malays, 148 

Mallet. 855 

Malory. Sir Thomas. 244 

Malta. 780. 895, 979, 996 

Mamelukes, 683, 685, 691 

Mammals, 33, 45, 50. (See also Ani- 
mals) 

Mammoth, 44, 48. 52. 57. 59. 70, 72, 75 

Man. 3. 4. 17, 26, 47. 48. 75. 78. 80, 84 
104; ancestry of, 36, 43, 44, 47, 50 
954; brotherhood of, 507; early, 43 
65. 67. 70. 75. 80. 87. 92. 105, 215 
347. 885; Eoanthr,>pus. 46. 53; Hei 
delberg. 46. 52, 54, 63; life of common 
197; as mechanical power, 933; Ne 
anderthal, 46, 54, 66, 69, 71, 81, 93 
primeval, 59, 62; and the State, 795 

Manchester. 940. 1119 

Manchu (man choo') language, 123 

Manchuria, 474, 561, 811, 991-95, 1009 

Manchus, 688, 811, 991 

Mandarin?, 212 

Mangu Khan, 674, 677, 1113 

Mani (ma'ng), 546. 572. 578-82. 1107 

Manichseans (mSn i ke' dnz), 524, 546. 
594. 655 

Manichaeism. 546 

Manif (ma nef). 577 

Mankind, 106, 235, 308; brotherhood of, 
797 

Manlius, Marcus, 392, 406, 431 

Manny, Sir Walter, 713 

Manresa (man ra' sd), Abbey of, 723 

Mansfield, Lord. 852 

Mansur. 596 

Mantua (man' tyQ &), 876 

Manuscripts, 345, 548, 717 

"Manzi," 679 

Manzikert (man' zi kSrt), 636 

Mara, Indian god, 357 

Marat (mara'). 869-71 

Marathon. 280-84. 292. 294 

Marchand. Colonel. 985 

Marcus Aurelius. (See Antoninus) 

Mardonius (mar do ni its), 287, 288 



1154 



INDEX 



Marduk (mar dook), a god, 180 

Marengo, 899, 1118 

Maria Theresa, 801, 803, 1117 

Marie Antoinette, 856 

Marie Louise, Archduchess, 908 

Mariner's compass, 555, 556, 681 

Maritime power, 162 

Marius (mar' i ws), 418, 432-35,441, 1105 

Mark, St., 497, 502, 503 

Marly, 862 

Marne, 1038, 1050 

Marozia, 626, 1111 

Marriage and intermarriage, 180, 192, 
208, 249 

Mars, god, 613 

Mars, planet, 2, 3 

Marseillaise, the, 876 

Marseilles (mar salz'), 253, 381, 408, 646, 

658, 736, 759, 878, 1113 
Marstcn Moor, 778 
Martel, Charles, 612, 613, 1110 
Martin V, Pope, 660, 664, 710 
Marx, Karl, 935, 936, 944, 946, 950, 1009 
Marxists, 210 

Mary, the Egyptian, 578, 579 
Mary, the Virgin, 499, 513 
Mary I, Queen of England, 773, 774 
Mary II, Quefen of England, 781 
Maryland, 829-32, 836 
Mas d'Azil, 74 
Masai hunters, 267 
Masked Tuaregs, 121 
Mason, Capt. John, 829 
Mason and Dixon line, 829, 831 
Maspero, 193, 195 
Mass, the, 708 
Massachusetts, 829, 831, 836, 843, 848, 

852, 882 
Massage, 113 
Massinissa, King, 411 
Mathematics, 600, 602, 675 
Matthew, St., 497, 501, 510 
Maulvi Muhammad, Ali, 574 
Mauritius, 806 
Maxentius, 519 
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 970, 

971, 1119, 1120 
Maximilian I, 755, 1114 
Maximin, 485 

Maya (ma' ya) writing, 154 
Mayence. (See Mainz) 
Mayfloiver, the, 803, 829, 831 
Mayor, 422 

Mayor of the Palace, 612 
Mazarin, Cardinal, 787, 788, 796 
Mazdaism, 547, 581 
Mecca, 569, 581, 589, 596 



I Meccan allies, 1109 
Mechanical Revolution, the, 922-36, 

951, 963, 977, 980, 987, 1000, 1061 
Medes, 140, 146, 190, 229, 239, 265, 268, 

281, 289, 292, 330, 384, 472, 1103 
Media (me' di &), 139, 232, 270, 275. 329, 

437, 452 
Medici (med' i che) family, 740, 751-52 
Medicine, 343, 600, 602 
Medina (mede'nd), 545, 554, 567, 568, 

573, 574, 580-86, 589-96 
Mediterranean, 120, 126, 132, 137, 155, 
161, 164, 218, 253, 338, 380, 401, 437. 
458, 468, 470, 488, 494, 541, 593, 618, 
630, 699, 739, 741, 746, 749, 780 
Mediterranean alphabets, 173, 253, 558; 
civilization, 115, 142; early, 172, 182, 
489; navigation of, 155, 157, 162, 
442; race and peoples, 74, 81, 108, 110, 
111, 121, 126, 152, 221, 2.38, 240, 263, 
381, 466; valley, 55, 88, 90, 132 
Medway, 781 
Meerut, 981 

Megabazus (meg d ba' zws), 279 
Megalithic monuments, 83, 113 
Megara (meg'drd), 285 
Megatherium, 76, 153 
Megiddo, 229, 1103 
Melanesia, 115 
Melasgird, 636, 1111 
Memphis, 274, 307, 325, 351 
Menahem (men' a hem), 229, 1103 
Menelaus (men e la' ws), 246 
Menes (me'nez), 142, 150 
Mengo, 986 

Mercator's projection, 474 
Mercenary armies, 752 
Merchants, 206, 211 
Mercia, 605, 614, 618 
Mercury, god, 391 
Mercury, planet, 2 
Merodach (mer'odak), 188 
Merovingians, 612, 783 
Merv, 525 

Merycodus (mer i ko' dws), 41 

Mesopotamia, 75, 103, 131-32, 138, 142- 

44, 155, 177, 187, 196, 255, 331, 439, 

455, 491, 537-44, 567, 584, 586, 596, 

679, 688, 690, 704, 1044 

Mesozoic (mes o z6' ik) period, 8, 11, 

25-43, 50, 51, 700 
Messiah, 231, 466, 493, 499, 504-9 
Messina (mese'nd), Straits of, 388, 

394, 401, 403 
Metallurgy, 927 

Metals, 78, 80, 152, 153, 165, 731 
Metaurus, 409 



INDEX 



1155 



Methodist revival, 813 

Methuselah, 99 

Metternich, 917, 937 

Metz, 863, 972 

Mexico (and the Mexicans), 112, 148, 

153, 154, 742, 747, 748, 970, 972, 1115 
Mey, Peter van der, 771 
Michael VII, emperor, 637 
Michael VIII. (See Palseologus, Michael) 
Michelangelo, 740 
Michelin guides, 169 
Mioklegarth, 668 
Microscope, 734 
Middelburg, 789 
Midianites, 222 
Midsummer day, 181, 183 
Midwinter day, 183 
Migrations, 78, 474-80, 483 
Mihiragula (mi her d goo' la), 550, 1108 
Miklagard, 618 
Milan, 487, 488, 73G, 740, 752, 753, 759, 

760, 904, 918 
Miletus (mlle'tMs), 254, 262, 278, 288, 

321 
Military organization, 136; service, 261; 

tactics, 785 
Milk, 70, 84, 134, 473 
Millet, 486 
Milligan, Joseph, 129 
Miltenburg, 737 

Miltiades (mil tl' d dez), 278, 294 
Milvian Bridge, 519 
Minerals, 8 
Ming dynasty, 171, 555, 557, 677, 688, 

724, 811, 1113 
Minos (mi'nos), 142, 159, 161, 179, 266 
Minotaur (min' 6 tawr), 159, 161 
Minstrels, 244 

Miocene (mi' d sen) period, 38, 41-53, 70 
Mirabeau (me ra bo), 859, 864-65 
Misraim and Misrim, 220 
Missionaries (and missions), 371, 613, 

614, 675, 677, 724, 985, 1115 
Mississippi, 833 
Mitanni, 138 
Mithraic inscriptions, 423 
Mithraic Sun-day, 499 
Mithraism, 466, 512, 513, 546, 654, 70S, 

1108 
Mithras, 352, 465, 513, 546 
Mithridates (mith ri da' tez), 434, 435, 

1106 
Mo Ti, 505 
Moa, 153 

Moab (and Moabites), 222, 232, 794 
Moawija. (-See Muawija) 
Mcesia, 491, 636, 1106 



Mogul, Great, 997, 1116 

Mogul dynasty, 693, 1116 

Mohammed. (See Muhammad) 

Mokanna, 596 

Moloch, 227 

Moltke, Count, 1005 

Moluccas, 743 

Mommsen, 215, 311, 766, 768 

Monarchy, 769, 771, 786-93, 799, 801, 
883, 915 

Monasteries (and monasticism), 530 
sqq., 614, 667, 709 

Monastir (monaster'), 1043 

Money, 164-65, 380, 391, 427, 551, 888. 
(See also Currency) 

Mongolia, 469, 472, 561, 672-80, 811 

Mongolian languages, 126, 129; races 
and peoples. 111, 116, 126, 152, 239, 
266, 329, 330, 436, 437, 472-78, 527, 
682, 700, 703, 797, 809, 810, 990 

Mongoloid tribes, 153, 744 

Mongols, 469, 473, 479, 486, 647, 666- 
sqq., 675, 682, 687, 688, 689, 700, 703, 
726, 740, 749, 809, 817. 1112, 1113 

Monkeys, 43, 48 

Monks. (<See Monasteries) 

Monmouth, cruiser, 1042 

Monosyllabic language, 123 

Monotheism, 581 

Monroe, President, 916, 971 

Monroe doctrine, 970, 984, 1029 

Mons, 1037 

Monte Cassino, 531, 533 

Montesquieu, 854 

Montezuma (mon te zoo' md), 747 

Montfort, Simon de, 774 

Montreal, 804 

Montserrat, 723 

Moon, 2, 98 

Moorish buffoon, 486 

Moorish paper, 718 

Moors, 422, 749 

Moose, 52 

Moral ideas, 233 

Moravia, 482 

More, Sir Thomas, 766, 931 

Moreau, General, 890, 1118 

Morelly, 855 

Morning Post, 941 

Mornington, Lord, 979 

Morocco, 163, 702, 987, 996, 1009, 
lOfiS 

Morris, William, 856 

Mortar, pebble, 69 

Morte d'Arthur, 244 

Mosasaurs (mo' sd sawrz), 28, 32 

Moscow, 689, 694, 792, 909, 1118 



1156 



INDEX 



Moscow, Grand Duke of, 689, 1114 

Moscow, Tsar of, 809 

Moses, 142. 146, 155, 187, 220, 231, 547 

Moslem schools, 697; universities, 601 

Moslems, the, 583-93, 597, 628, 635, 
639, 645-46, 657, 668, 674, 689, 696, 
700, 718, 981, 1109-11; in Europe, 
593-95, 606, 612, 616, 621, 632, 652. 
742, 793, 1111. (See also Crusades and 
Islam) 

Mosses, 20 

Mosso, 156 

Most, 711 

Mosul, 642, 691 

Motley, 771-72 

Mounds, 83, 95 

Mountains (and mountaineering), 3, 38 

Mousterian Age (and implements), 46, 
58, 60, 63 

Muawija (mooawe'ya), 589-94, 1110 

Mudfish, 21, 42 

Muehlon, Herr, 1067 

Muhammad (mii ham' dd), prophet, 235, 
497, 506, 545; 555, 561, 567, 685, 696, 
708; life of, 570 sqq., 591, 592; teach- 
ing of, 579-82, 594 

Muhammad II, sultan, 752, 1114 

Muhammad-Ibn-Musa, 602 

Muhammadan communistic movement, 
716 

Muhammadanism, 594, 606, 694. (See 
also Islam and Muhammad) 

Mulberry tree, 458 

Mules, 110 

Mlilhausen (mul' hou zeu), 891 

Miiller, Max, 180 

Mummies, 112 

Munich (mu' nik), 731 

Munster (mun'ster), 715, 1026, 1115 

Miinster, Bishop of, 715 

Munzuk, 486 

Murad I, 683 

Murat (mu ra'), 910 

Murzuk, 88 

Muscovites, 793 

Muscovy, empire of, 792 

Musical instruments, 86 

Musk ox, 44, 48, 57, 75 

Muskets, 785 

Mycale (mik'dle), 288, 290, 1104 

Mycenae (ml se' ne), 80, 254, 265, 267 

Mycenean (ml se ne' dn) architecture, 
383 

Mycerinus (mis e ri' nils), 144 

Mylaj, 402, 1105 

Myos-hormos, 462 

Myrina (mi rl' no), 385 



Myron, 294 

Mysteries, religious, 316 

Mythology, 100, 304 

N 

Nabatean Kings, 542 

Nabonidus (nab 6 nl' dus), 100-93, 197, 

217, 226, 231, 269, 274. 327. 355 
Nadir Shah (na' dSr sha'), 06, 1117 
Nagasaki (na ga sa' ke), 992 
Nalanda, 564 
Nanking, 669, 1111 
Naples, 385, 440, 531-32, 653, 736, 766, 

891, 904, 917, 968, 1108 
Napoleon I, 6.53, 765, 872, 876, 883. 892- 

915, 922, 924, 979, 1117-18; III, 492, 

965-73, 975, 1119-20 
Narbonne, 736 
Naseby, 778 
Nasmvth, 926 
Natal, 987 
Nathan, 225 
"National Schools," 934 
Nationalism, 959-63, 975, 1023-24 
Nationalization, 947 
Natural rights, selection, 15 
Nautilus, Pearly, 33 
Naval tactics, Roman, 403 
Navarino (navare'no), battle of, 920, 

1119 
Navigation, early, 155-64, 241 
Nazarenes, 510-13 
Neanderthal (na an' der tal) man, 4''>, 

54, 66, 67, 71, 81, 93, 420, 427 
Nebuchadnezzar (neb u kdd nez' dr) (the 

Great) II, 140, 146, 162, 217, 228, 2.30, 

269, 324, 327, 1104 
Nebulae, 1 
Necho (ne'ko), Pharaoh, 146, 163, 229. 

342, 439, 461, 741, 1103-4 
Necker, 863 
Needles, bone, 69 
Negritos, 991 
Negroes, 47. 51, 110, 119, 143, 152. 462. 

749, 832, 851, 852 
Negroid race, 67, 109, 112, 143 
Nehemiah, 232 
Nelson, Horatio, 895-97, 905 
Neohipparion, 41 
Neolithic Age, 55, 80, 83, 119-20, 125-27, 

142, 143, 241; agriculture, 85-7, 100, 

135, 267; civilization and culture, 77, 

98-104, 111-12, 119, 131-34, 140, 144, 

148, 155-59, 242-46; man, 75-8, 97-8, 

102-4, 111, 125, 168, 215, 246, 249, 847 
Neo-platonism, 514, 726 



INDEX 



1157 



Nepal Cne'pawl'), 355. 561, 562, 811 

Nephthys (nef this), 192 

Neptune, planet, 2 

Nero, 454-55, 512, 531, 1106 

Nerva, 455, 1124 

Nestorian Christians, 525, 538, 547, 554, 
600, 667, 677, 679 

Netherlands, the. 755. 762, 769, 770-73, 
788, 803, 918-20. (See also Dutch Re- 
publi • and Holland) 

Nets, flax, 85 

Neustadt (noi' stat), 736 

Neustria, 612-13, 1110 

Neva, river, 792 

New Amsterdam, 803. 829-32 

New England, 45, 741, 802, 828-32 

Newfoundland. 803. 997 

Ne V Guinea. 108. 111. 129 

New Habsburg. 754. 1112 

New Hampshire. 828. 831, 836 

New Harmony (U.S.A.). 942 

New Jersey. 831. 836. 844, 1062 

New Lanark, 941-42 

Newmarket, 781 

New Mexico, 1028 

New Orleans, 804 

New Plymouth, 829 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 348, 462, 733, 1116 

Newts. 21 

New Year, festival of. 183 

New York, 426, 459, 736, 802, 831, 836, 
839, 846, 924, 1118 

New Zealand, 153, 983, 998-99 

Niarchus, 318 

Nicffia (nl se' a), 522-23, 636, 642, 1107 

Nice, Province of, 968 

Nicene (ni' sen) Creed, 522, 624, 1107 

Nicephorus (nl sef 6 rws), 623, 1110 

Nicholas 1, tsar, 920, 941, 966, 1119; II, 
1001 

Nicholas of Myra, 522 

Nicholson, Gen. John, 981 

Nickel, 2, 927 

Nicomedes (nik o me' dez). King of 
Bithynia, 430 

Nicomedia, 488, 518, 521 

Niemen (ne'men), 905 

Nietzsche (ne' che), 1005 

Nieuw Amsterdam. (.See New Amster- 
dam) 
Nile, the, 89-90, 107, 125, 146, 152, 156- 
57, 215, 255, 462, 702, 985; battle of, 
896, 1118; delta, 144, 164, 181; valley, 
143, 214, 1102 
Nineveh (nin'ev^, 138-40, 146, 190, 
231, 269, 326. 537. 539, 543, 545, 691, 
1103. 1109 



Nippur (nip poor'), 103, 131. 136, 142, 

215, 691 
Nirvana (nir va' nd), 362, 364, 370 
Nish, 457, 481, 485, 520, 1107 
Nisibin, 543 
Nitrate of silver, 602 
Nitric acid, 602 
Noah, 110 
Nobility, 200. 205 
Nogaret. Guillaume de, 663. 1113 
Nomadism (and Nomads). 84. 107. 133. 
135. 246. 329. 548. 567. 666. 670. 689, 
697-98, 703-4 
Nominalism. 728 sqq. 
Nonconformity, 721 

Nordic race. 123. 152, 266. 312, 316. 329. 
475. 608. 630. 682. 703, 709. 726. 797, 
811, 1014 
Normandy (and the Normans). 618. 
631-32. 637-42. 735. 865. 1111; duke- 
dom of. 626. 630 
Norse language. 238. 619 
Northmen. 468. 617. 618, 628-30. 635, 

709, 1014 
North Sea, the, 55, 468. 630, 739-40. 741 
Northumberland. 933 
Northumbria. kingdom of. 605. 615 
Norway. 75. 526. 616. 630, 661, 720, 

761, 803, 919, 1111 
Norwegian language. 238 
Norwich. 713 
Nottingham. 777, 924 
Nova Scotia, 741 
Novgorod (novgorod'). 631, 689, 736, 

739, 1110 
Nubia, 200 
Nubian wild ass, 163 
Numbers, use of, 97 
Numerals, Arabic, 164, 602, 652 
Numidia (and Numidians), 407, 410, 

416, 432, 463 
Nuns, 709 

Nuremberg, 736; Peace of, 761 
Numberg (nurn berch), cruiser, 1042 

O 
Oak, 45 
Oars. 156 

Obedience and will. 702-7 
Obi (6' be), river. 329. 816 
Occam, 729, 730, 1113 
Ocean, 3 
Oceania, 153 

Octavian. {See Augustus) 
Odenathus (od e na' thus), 538, 568, 

1107 
Odiu. 613 



1158 



INDEX 



Odoacer (o d5a'ser), 623, 1108 

Odysseus, 437 

Odyssey. (See Homer) 

(Ecumenical councils, 522 

Offerings, 178 

Ogdai Khan, 672, 673, 1112 

Oglethorpe, 830, 1117 

Ohio (6 hi' 6), 45, 833 

"Old Man" in religion, 95, 102-4, 885 

Oligarchies, 258, 260 

Oligocene (ol' i go sen) period, 38, 39, 50, 

51 
Olney, Mr., 1029, 1078 
Olympiad, first, 264, 1103 
Olympian games, 264 
Olympias, 316 sqq., 329, 336, 343, 387 
Olympus, mount, 283 
Omar I, caliph, 584-89, 647, 1109 
Omayyads (omi'yadz), 591-601, 625, 

628, 1110 
O'Neil of Tyrone, 82 
Op possum, 43 
Oracles, 194, 256, 270 
Orange, house of, 773 
Orange, Duke of, 772 
Orange River, 986 
Orang-outang, 46 
Orbit of earth, 44 
Orient, ship, 896 
Orientation of temples, 181, 183 
Origen (or' i jen), 514 
Orissa, 378 

Orlando, Signor, 1068, 1071 
Orleans, 487, 736, 937 
Ormonde, Duke of, 819 
Ormuz, 679 

Ormuzd (or'miizd), 545, 546 
Ornaments, 85 

Ornithorhynchus (or nith d ring' kws) , 40 
Orpheus (or'fus), 466 
Orphic cult, 316 
Orsini (or se ne) , family, 663 
Orthodox Church. (.See Greek Church) 
Osborn, Prof. H. F., 65, 462 
Osiris (d sir' is), 192, 351, 352 
Osman, House of, 683 
Ostia, 428 
Ostracism, 263 

Ostrogoths, 476, 481, 527, 631, 1108 
Othman, 589, 591, 1109 
Otho, Emperor, 455, 1109 
Otis, James, 834 
Otranto, 685 
Otters, 26, 52 
Otto I, 627, 6.35, 660, 1111 
Otto II, 627, 1111 
Otto III, 627, 1111 



Otto of Bavaria, 920 

Ottoman Empire, 681-87, 691, 692, 696, 

697, 736, 1114. (See also Turkey and 

Turks) 
Oudh (oud), 805, 808, 981 
Ovid, 10 

Owen, Robert, 940-45, 1119 
Ownership, 885 
Ox, great, 75 
Ox-carts, 221 
Oxen, 83, 162, 241, 247 
Oxford, 459, 601, 659, 712, 726, 728, 

729, 736, 777, 813, 819, 835, 862, 964, 

1011 
Oxide of iron, 7 
Oxus, 550 

Oxydactylus (ok si dak' ti lus), 41 
Oxygen (ok' si jen), 19 



Pacific Ocean, 33, 62, 115, 152, 214, 

672, 702, 742, 747, 811, 1008, 1112 
Paddling in navigation, 157 
Padua, 487 
Paine, Tom, 849 
Painted pebbles, 73 sq., 74 
Painting, Palaeolithic, 71 
Paionia, 288 
Palseoanthropus Heidelbergensis (pSI- 

e o a,n thro' ptis hi' del berg en' sis) , 

46, 52, 54 
Palajolithic age, 46, 55, 65, 68, 74, 80, 

143; art, 71, 93, 99; implements, 57, 

60, 77, 107; man, 62, 65, 76, 80, 87, 98, 

104, 108, 112, 117, 118, 129, 152, 168, 

215, 347, 746, 759, 885 
Palaiologus (pal e ol' d gus), Michael 

(Michael VIII), 662; Zoe, 689 
Palajopithecus (pal e o pi the' k^s), 50 
Palaeozoic (paleozo'ik) period, 8, 16, 

19, 24, 25, 36, 38, 42 
Palais Royal, 860 
Palermo (pd ler' mo), 403 
Palestine, 202, 218-21, 227, 382, 493. 

568, 636-37, 644, 657, 667, 674, 679, 

691, 1007, 1113 
Pali (pa' li) language, 355 
Palms, Cainozoic, 37 
Palmyra (pal mi'rd), 538, 542 sqq., 568, 

1107 
Palos (pa' 16s), 741 
Pamir (pa mer') Plateau, 329 
Pamirs, 562, 589, 670, 688, 740 
Pampeluna (pam pe loo' na), 722, 1114 
Pamphylia (pam fil' i a), 643 
Panama Canal, 1031 



INDEX 



1159 



Panama, Isthmus of, 743, 746 

Pan-American Conferences, 1001, 1029 

Pan Chau, 1106 

Pan-German movement, 1008 

Panipat (pa'neput), 693, 1114 

Pannonia (pa no' ni d), 481, 527, 1106 

Panther in Europe, 268 

Papacy (incl. popes), policy of, 654; 
outline of, 660; and the Great War, 
725; and world dominion, 802; mis- 
cellaneous, 526, 533, 607, 612, 621 sqq., 
632, 637, 644 sqq., 659, 663, 677 sq., 
684 sf?7.,708s(?.,720,724,744, 758, 796, 
937, 1 1 13. (See also Rome, Church of) 

Papal Schism, 663, 710, 1113 

Paper, introduction and use of, 144, 346, 
603, 681, 717 sq., 758 

Papua (pa'pua), type of mankind in, 
108 

Papuan speech, 129 

Papyrus (pa pi' rws), 144, 347, 603 

Parchment, 603 

Parchment promissory notes, 653 

Pariahs, 211 

Paris, Peace of, 830, 1117; during the 
Revolution, 858 sqq.; Napoleon in, 
892, 904, 910, 914, capitulation of, 
911; rising against Charles X, 917; 
revolution of 1848, 938; siege of. 972; 
Zeppelin raids on, 1041; Peace Con- 
ference at, 1061-72, 1076-81; miscel- 
laneous, 736, 839, 901, 935, 1120 

Paris, University of, 724, 729, 820 

Parker, E. H., 470 

Parliament, government by, 750; Eng- 
lish, 773-83, 798, 808, 833 sg., 1017 sg., 
1118; Polish, 801 

Parliamentary Monarchy in Europe, 793 

Parma, 652 

Parmenio (par mS' ni o), 318, 333 

Parsees, 545, 696 

Parthenon (par' the ndn), 294 

Parthia (and Parthians), 330 sq., 337, 
436 sqq., 452, 455, 468, 472 sq., 537, 
542 sq., 1106 

Paschal II, 1111 

Passau (pas'ou). Treaty of, 762, 1115 

Passover, Feast of the, 507 sq. 

Passy (pa se'), 864 

Pasteur (pas tur'), 348 

Patricians, Roman, 389-96 

Patriotism, 260, 394, 797 

Pattison, Prof. Pringle, 729 

Patzinaks, 635 

Paul, St., 337, 423, 507, 510 sqq., 952 

Paul, Tsar of Russia, 1117 

Paulicians, 524 



Pauline epistles, 510 sq. 

Pauline mysteries, 513 

Pa via (pa ve'<i), 759 

Peace, universal, 234, 653 

Peace Conference. (.See Paris) 

Peas, as food, 85 

Peasant revolts, 714 sq., 758, 821, 934, 
1113 

Peasants, 118, 198 

Pecunia, 164 

Pecus, 165 

Peers, Council of, 776 

Pegu (pegoo'), 679 

Peisistratidae (pi sis tra' ti de), 264 

Peifcistratus (pi sis' tra tws), 258, 280-85, 
391, 1104 

Pekinese language, 123 

Peking, 183, 561, 669, 674 sq., 694, 792, 
811, 989, 1112, 1120 

Peloponnesian War, 291, 1104 

Pelycosaurs (pel' i ko sawrz), 23 

Pendulum, invention of, 602 

Penelope, 248 

Penn, William, 829 

Pennsylvania, 829, 831, 843 sq., 850 

Pentateuch, 218 sqq., 231 

Pepi, 145, 342, 765 

Pepin (pep' in) I, 612, 616, 1110; son of 
Charlemagne, 621; of Heristhal, 612, 
1110 

Pepys, Samuel, 781 

Pergamum (per' get mum), 337, 430 sq., 
436 

Pericles (per' i klez), 259, 290 sgg., 307, 
457, 712 sq., 740, 1104; Age of, 300 
sq., 308 

Perihelion, 44 

Peripatetic school, 343 

Periplus, of Hanno, 163, 184 

Perkin, 1003 

Perry, Commodore, 993, 1119 

Persepolis (persep'dlis), 307, 327, 584 

Persia (and the Persians), 81, 109, 164, 
190, 229-30, 240, 257, 267, 315, 319, 
331, 336-37, 386, 436, 440, 462, 467, 
470, 472, 479, 543, 547-48, 554-57, 
568, 583-85, 631, 636, 666, 670, 675- 
79, 687, 699, 716, 735, 806, 817, 1107; 
history (rise of), 140, 144, 146, 152, 
190, 202, 259, 261-64, 267-71; (£?«- 
pire), 452, 1105-8; (war with Greece), 
274 sqq.; (war with Alexander), 321, 
324-30, 1123; {Sa.ssanid Empire), 
457, 537-39, 545, 596, 1109; (Islam 
and Persia), 585-96, 628; (Mongol 
Empire), 673, 689, 694; religion of, 
350-52, 518, 524, 538, 545-46, 554, 696 



11 GO 



INDEX 



Persian Gulf, 126, 132, 1.36, 156, 329, 679 
Persian language, 118, 140, 240, 698 
Peru, 112, 115, 153-54, 746-49, 991, 1115 
Peshawar (peshawr'), 367, 562 
Pestilence, 74, 457, 470, 529, 552, 606, 

610, 621, 640, 712, 923, 1107 S77. 
Peter, St., 85, 508, 622, 662; the Great, 
792 sq., 809, 967, 1116; the Hermit, 
639 sq 
Peterhof, 792 
Petition of Right, 776 
Petra (pe' trd), 568 
Petrie, Flinders, 143 
Petrograd, 792, 1047 
Petronius {pe tro' ni tis), 458 
Petschenegs, 635 sq. 
Phalanx, 313 sq. 
Phanerogams, 22 
Pharaohs, the, 145, 1.59, 191 sq., 197 

sqq., 220, 227, 342 sq., 439, 461 
Pharisees, 496, 502 

Pharsalos (far sa' los), battle of, 441, 1106 
Pheidippides (fl dip' i dez), 281 
Phidias (fid' i as), 294 sq. 
Philadelphia (ancient), .542, 643; U. S. A., 

829, 839 S7., 846, 1117 
Philip, of Hesse, 761 
Philip of Macedon, 292, 302, 306 sqq., 

331 sqq., 340, 343, 372, 489, 1104 
Philip, King of France, 663 
Philip II, King of Spain, 762, 770 sq., 

783, 793, 839 
Philip, Duke of Orleans, 860, 882, 917 
Philippine Islands, 743, 979, 992, 1029 
Philistia (and Philistines), 142, 188, 221 

sqq., 382 
Philoni.sm, 514 

Philosophy, primitive, 92; Greek, 304, 
349; medicinal, 727 sqq.; experi- 
mental, 734 
Philotas (fi 16' ids), 318, 333 
Phinehas, 223 
Phocians (fo' shi anz), 313 
PhcEnicia (fe nish' d), and Phoenicians, 
158 ,sgg., 168, 177, 214, 218 sq., 225, 
228. sqq., 279-85,324-37, 342, 493, 560, 
language and script, 120, 173; colonies, 
253, 383 
Phoenix, steamship, 924 
Phonetic spelling, 559 
Phonograms, 170 sq. 
Phrygia (frij'id), and Phrygians, 253, 

265, 330, 337, 382, 682 
Phrygius, 318 
Physics, 602 
Physiocrats, 855 
Piacenza (pya chen' tsa), 639 | 



Pictographs, 169 .sqq. 

Picts, 461 

Picture writing, 144, 153, 173 

Piedmont, 876 

Pig, 48, 169; unclean to Moslems, 981 

Pigtails, Chinese, 688, 811, 990 

Pilate, Pontius, 507 

Pile dwellings, 80, 132. (See also Lake 
dwellings) 

Pilgrim Fathers, 851 

Pilgrims, 632, 639 

Pillnit.z, 872 

Piltdown skull, 46, 53 sqq. 

Pindar (pin'ddr), 320 

Pins, bone, 85 

Piracy, 739 

Pisa, 732, 736 

Pithecanthropus (pith e kan ohro p(<3) 
erectus, 46, 49 sqq. 

Pitt, William, the "Younger," 903 

Pius, VII, 903 

Pixodarus (pik sd diir' lis), 318 

Pizarro (pizar'6), 747, 1115 

Placentia (pld sen' shi d). (See Piacenza) 

Plague. (See Pestilence) 

Plaiting, Neolithic, 78 

Planets, 2 sq. 

Plants, 8 sqq. 

Plassey, battle of, 808, 1117 

Platsea (pld te' d), battle of, 284, 288 

sqq., 296, 1104 
Plato, 292, 298, 299 sqq., 340, 372, 491, 

539, 726, 766, 944, 1104 
Playfair, 954 

Plebeians, Roman, 389 sqq., 418, 419 
Pleistocene (plls' to sen) Age, 38, 44, 46, 

48 sq., 75, 121, 197 
Plesiosaurs (pie' zi <5 sawrz), 28, 32, 36 
Pliny, the elder, 132; the younger, 463, 602 
Pliocene (pH' d sen) Age, 38, 44, 46, 51 

sq., 215 
Plotinus (p\d tl' nits), 348, 514 
Plunkett, Sir Horace, 1023 
Plutarch, 263, 293 sq., 316, 320. 332, 336, 

406, 432, 435, 442 sqq., 520, 894 
Pluvial Age, 126 sq., 246 
Plymouth, 915; (New England), 851 
Plymouth Company 828 
Po, valley of the, 330, 384, 395, 404 
Pocahontas (p6 kd hon' tds), 828 
Pocock, R. I., 72 
Pocock, Roger, 239, 479 
Poitiers, 612, 7.35, 1110 
Poland, 635, 664, 673, 685, 690, 735, 787, 
795, 798-801, 809, 816, 823, 826, 865, 
872, 906-8, 915, 918-20, 937, 1080, 
1116, 1119 



INDEX 



iir.i 



Polish language, 238 

Political ideas, common, 449 

Politics (and Politicians), 426, 700, 79(3 

Polo, Maffeo, 678 

Polo, Marco, 678, 681, 741, 751, 1113 

Polo, Nicolo, 678 

Polyclitus (pol i kli' tws), 294 

Polynesia, 115, 128; languages of, 12 1, 
129; peoples of, 81, 116, 124 

Pompadour, Madame do, 791 

Pompeii (pom pa' ye), 421 

Pompey, 436, 439-43, 467-70, 476, 496, 
546, 1106 

Pondicherry, 807 

Pontifex maximus, 619 

Pontus, 481, 541 

Poor, the, 818 sq. 

Poor Laws, 766 

Pope, Alex., 1017 

Popes. (.See Papacy) 

Poplicola (pop lik' o la), Valerius, 391 

Poppsea {pd pe' d), 454 

Popular education, Christianity and, 700 
sqq. 

Port Arthur, 989, 994 

Port Sunlight, 942 

Porto Rico, 1029 

Portugal (and Portuguese), 163, 238, 482, 
491, 664, 907, 1014, 1108, 1112-14; 
overseas trade and expansion of, 740- 
44, 747-49, 801, 807, 852, 979, 984, 991 

Porus (p6' tUs), king, 328 sq., 368 

Posen, 910, 937, 972, 1012 

Post horses in ancient Persia, 275 

Potash, 602 

Potato, 154 

Potomac, river, 847 

Potsdam, 792 

Pottery, 77, 82 sq., 100 sq., 383, 603 

Poultry. (.Sec Fowl) 

Powers, Great, 767 sqq., 797, 802, 826, 
917, 966, 975, 1024 

Prague, 710, 732, 937 sg., 1119; Univer- 
sity of, 710 

Prayer-flags, Buddhist, 378 

Prayer-wheels, 376 

Presbyterianism, 776 

Prescott, 762 sq. 

Press, free, 843 ; in politics, 396 

Prester John, 679 

Priam (prl'dm), 283 

Pride, Colonel, 779 sq. 

Priestcraft (incl. Priesthood and Priests), 
96, 100, 103, 150, 178-89, 193-95, 205, 
208, 225, 247, 251, 256, 369, 582, 649, 
709-10, 796 

Primal law, 59 



Prince, character of a, 751 sqq. 
Princes, an exclusive class, 209 
Princeton, Univ. of, 1062 
Printing, 175, 347, 396, 717 .sq., 724, 731, 

1114; Chinese, 550 
Prisons (pris' kits), 485 sq., 607, llOS 
Prisoners as slaves, 851 
Prisons, English, 882 
Private enterprise, 822 sq., 1056 sqq.; 

ownership, 822; property, 782 
Probus (pro' bus), emperor, 481, 1107 
Production, distribution and profits of, 

823 ; of machinery, 824 
Profit, 878 

Prokop the Great, 711 
Proletariat, 210. 390, 935, 944 sqq. 
Promissory notes, early, 165 
Property, 201, 207, 705, 769, 855, 882 

sqq., 923, 936 sq., 946 
Prophets, Jewish, 104 sq. 
Proterozoic (prot er d z6' ik) period, 8, 

11, 14, 17 sq. 
Protestantism, 709, 725, 761-62, 769-81, 

770, 785, 789, 793, 802, 815, 819-20, 

828-32, 991, 1014-21 
Provence, 913 
Proverbs, book of, 232 
Providence, Rhode Island, 836 
Prussia, 786, 791, 795-800, 827, 858, 865, 

872, 904, 908, 914, 919, 968-72, 1004, 

1119-20 
Przemysl (pshem'isl), 1041 
Psalms, 2J2 
Psammetichus (sa met' i kws), 146, 229, 

266, 1103 
Pskof, 730 
Pteria (te'rio), 272 
Ptolemies, 337, 342, 371, 494 
Ptolemy (tol' e' mi) I, 318, 342, 344, 

348-55, 557, 1105; Ptolemy II, 344-45; 

Ptolemy III, 345 
Public opinion, growth of, 708 
Public schools. {See Schools, public) 
"Pul," Assyrian monarch, 229 
Pultusk, 904 
Punch, 962, 1011 
Punic (pu' nik) language, 457; wars, 142, 

388 sq., 394, 398 s^-. 1105 
Punjab, 147, 330, 367 sq., 674, 693 sq., 

806, 1105 
Puritans, 780, 830 
Pyramids, 103, 144 sg., 181, 202, 215; 

battle of the, 894 
Pyrenees, 127, 482, 593, 606, 610 sg., 

616, 789, 910, 1110 
Pyrrhus (pir' us), 386 sqq., 401, 632, 1105 
Pytho (pi' tho), 271 



11G2 



INDEX 



QuAco, 1117 
Quadrupedal reptiles, 28 
Quartzite implements, 107 
Quebec, 805, 1117 
Quipus, 154 
Quixada (ke ha' da), 762 



Ra, 193 

Races of mankind, 66, 67, 74, 89, 

106-19 
Radiolaria, 8 
Ragusa (ra goo' za), 736 
Rahab, month of, 574 
Rai, Lajpat, 980 
Railways, 924, 1119 
Rajgir, 357 

Rajput (raj poot') clans, 550 . 
Rajput princes, 805 
Rajputana, 550, 735, 805 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 828 
Ramah, 224 

Rambouillet (ron boo ya'), 862 
Rameses (ram'esez) II, 142, 146, 220, 

221, 228, 342, 1102 
Rameses III, 191, 221 
Raphael, 740 

Rasputin (ras poot' in), 1047 
Ratisbon, Diet of, 761 
Ratzel, 154, 479 

Ravenna, 482, 484, 488, 527, 625, 1109 
Rebus, 172 

Reconstruction, Ministry of, 1055 
Red Cross, 754 
Red Indians, 473, 832 
Red Sea, 121, 126, 132, 156, 157, 220, 

226, 228, 342, 457, 462 
"Red Sea" river, 89, 92 
Redmond, John, 1021, 1022 
Reed pipes, 86 
Reform Bill, 937, 1119 
Reformation, the, 518, 720, 724, 758, 

819, 820 
Regicide, 779 

Reindeer, 48, 57, 58, 70, 72, 76, 87 
Reindeer Age, 60, 69, 73-4 
Reindeer men, 76, 81, 87, 93, 103, 241 
Religion, 94-7, 101, 180, 348-52, 506 

sqq., 723, 855, 957; "Old Man" in, 

24, 100-4 
Religious wars, 761 
Remus (re' mus) and Romulus (rem' Q- 

Ms), 383 
Renaissance, 699, 740 
Renascence, 699 
Rent, 197, 206 



Reparation, 164 

Representation, political, 425, 845, 949 

Reproduction, 13, 15; of amphibia, 22; 
of mammals, 40 

Reptiles, 22, 23, 25 sqq. 

Republicanism, 798, 813, 891 

Republics, 258, 702, 703 

Retailers, 207 

Revere, Paul, 837, 840 

"Revisionists," 945 

Revolution, 939, 947 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 1017 

Rhine, 52, 436, 437, 452, 455, 468, 475, 
481, 484, 633, 758, 786, 788, 815, 875, 
911, 968 

Rhineland, 527, 611, 632, 64 2, 770 

Rhinoceros, 43, 44, 48, 52, 57 

Rhode Island, 828, 831, 836, 842, 847 

Rhodes, 338, 643 

Rhodesia, 998 

Rhondda, Lord, 1054 

Rhone valley, 527 

Rice, 560 

Richard I, Coeur de Lion, 645, 774 

Richard II, 715, 1112 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 787, 796, 803 

Richmond, 970 

Ridgeway, W., 80 

Riga, 736, 739, 1047 

Righteousness, 341 

Rio de Oro (re' o da 6' ro), 163 

Ritual, 708. (See also Christianity) 

Riviera (re ve ar' a), French, 381 ; Italian, 
891 

Robert of Sicily. {See Guiscard, Robert) 

Robertson, 763 

Robespierre' (ro bes pyar'), 869, 876- 
81, 893, 1118 

Robinson, J. H., 662, 803 

Rochefort, 914 

Rocks, 6, 9, 20 

Rocquain, 855 

Roger I, King of Sicily, 651 

Rolf the Ganger, 619, 630, 1126 

Roman coins, 389 

Roman Empire, 447 sqq.; social and po- 
litical state of, 457, 462-69, 472, 478, 
726; fall of, 478, 480, 482; separation 
into Eastern and Western Empires, 
488, 491; later Roman Empire (West- 
ern), 519, 526, 535, 539, 553, 555, 606, 
619, 621, 623, 631, 717, 814, 816, 1107. 
(See also Eastern (Greek) Empire) 

Roman law, 394, 537; roads, 394, 468 

Roman Republic (19th century), 891, 
1119 

Romansch language, 612, 754 



INDEX 



11G3 



Rome, 435, 439, 449, 475, 492, 495, 512, 
527, 531, 537, 541, 554, 568, 614, 685, 
739, 750, 758, 824, 968, 971, 1007; 
early history of, 380-86, 392, 1103, 
1104; war with Carthage, 388; social 
and political state of, 389-98, 405, 
412-31, 437, 445, 550, 705, 931, 1105; 
assemblies of, 396, 398, 418, 419, 425, 
436; patricians and plebeians, 389-96, 
418-19; Senate, 389, 393, 396-400, 
413, 415-19, 425-35, 443-45, 454; 
Consuls of, 389, 398; colonies of, 390, 
394, 454; Punic wars, 142, 388 sq., 
394, 398 sqq., 1123; military system of, 
417, 436, 450; bequests to, 430, 1105; 
Social war, 433, 1106; monarchy in, 
and the fall of the Republic, 442-50; 
Roman Empire {see above) ; plague in, 
529, 606, 1109; true cross at, 539, 
647; "duke of," 607; Pepin crowned 
at, 623; in 10th century, 627; sacked 
by Guiscard, 632, 1126; Germans raid, 
759, 1114; Charlemagne crowned at, 
767 

Rome, Church of (inc. general Christian 
associations), 512-14, 525, 605-7, 614, 
619-23, 637, 639, 649, 653-64, 688, 
694, 753, 758, 767, 781, 900. {See also 
Catholicism and Papacy) 

Romulus and Remus, 383 

Roosevelt, President, 1027, 1030, 1062, 
1066 

Rose, Holland, 893, 896, 902 

Roses, Wars of the, 735 

Ross, 470, 596 

Rostro-carinate implements, 46, 60, 215 

Roth, H. L., 78 

"Roum," Empire of, 682 

Roumania (and the Roumanians), 491, 
635, 674, 683, 918, 920, 1025, 1045 

Rousseau (roos5'), J. J., 855, 856, 869, 
877, 893, 1117 

Rowing, 157, 402 

Roxana, 332, 336 

Royal Asiatic Society, 564 

Royal families, marriage of, 208 

Royal Society of Lon on, 557, 791, 929 

Rubicon (roo' bi kon), the, 441 

Rudolf I, German Emperor, 754, 1113 

Rulers, deification of, 415 

Ruling families, 258 

Rumansch language. (.See Romansch 
language) 

Rump Parliament, 779 

Rurik, 631, 1110 

Russia, 75, 76, 118. 125, 142, 232, 267, 
275, 329, 436, 467, 470, 473, 476, 481, 



488, 494, 521, 582, 618, 628, 631, 635, 
674, 687, 689, 694, 699, 716, 735, 786, 
793-99, 809-10, 814, 816, 826, 865, 
905, 909, 920, 945, 966. 974, 991-96, 
1009, 1010, 1026, 1032, 1033, 1046, 
1047, nil, 1121. (.See fl/so Great War) 

Russian language, 118, 236, 558 

Rustam, 585 

Rusticiano, 678 

Ruth, Book of, 222 

Rutilius, P. Rufus, 433 



Saar (sar) Valley, 1080 

Sabbath, Jewish, 495, 499, 500, 514 

Sabellians, 593 

Sachsenhausen (sach' sen hou zen), 736 

Sacraments, 100, 1G2 

Sacrifice, 102, 150-53. 178, 247, 746, 953; 

human, 88, 100, 104, 420 
Sadducees, 496 
Sadowa (sa'dova), battle of, 971, 973, 

1120 
Safiyya (safye'ja), 578-79 
Sagas, 245, 618 
Saghalien (sa ga len'), 994 
Sahara, 55, 126, 152, 162, 1025 
Sails, use of, 157 
St. Andrew's, 869 

St. Angelo, castle of, 606, 627, 649, 759 
St. Gall, monastery of, 634 
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 862 
St. Gothard Pass, 740 
St. Helena, 915, 998 
St. Just, 878 
St. Lawrence river, 803 
St. Medard, 613 
St. Peter's, Rome, 513, 758 
St. Petersburg. {See Petrograd) 
St. Sophia, Church of, 536, 684 
Sainte Menehould, 868 
Sakas (sa' kas), 549 
Sakya (sa' kya) clan, 355 
Saladin (sal' a din), 645, 667, 1112 
Salanus (sal' amis), 285, 292, 296, 402, 

585, 1104 
SaUsbury, Lord, 1120 
Salmon of Reindeer Age, 73 
Salonika, 1043 
Salt, 88 

Salvation, Christian theory of, 952 
Salvation Army, 352, 724 
Samaria, 139, 232 
Samarkand, 328-32, 474, 525, 562, 563, 

670, 691, 693 
Samnites, 386, 1105 



1164 



INDEX 



Samoan Islands, 1028 

Samos, 254, 293 

Samoyed (sam' d yed) language, 123 

Samson, 222. 231 

Samuel, Book of, 222-25 

Samurai (sSm' u rl), 222-25, 992 

San Casciano, 751 

Sanderson, F. W., 820 

Sandracottus. (See Chandragupta) 

Sandstone, 5 

Sandwich Islands, 1028 

Sanscrit, 239, 251, 559, 695 

Sans Souci (san soo se'). park of, 792 

San Stefano, treaty of, 973, 1000, 1120 

Santa Maria, ship, 742 

Sapor I, 538, 540, 1107 

Saracens, 626 

Sarajevo (sil rl' vo), 962, 1033 

Saratoga, 839 

Sardanapalus (sar dcif nd pa' li<s), 140, 

189. 228. 231, 266, 1103 
Sardes. 643 

Sardinia. 162. 404, 482. 755. 918. 968 
Sardis, 265, 272, 279, 288, 321 
Sargon I, 103, 137-42, 190. 215. 520. 

765, 1122; II, 139-42, 146, 189, 228. 

268. 1103 
Sarmatians, 239. 472, 635 
Sarum. Old. 782 
Sassanids (sas' d nidz). 452. 546. 596. 

1107. (See a/so Persia) 
Saturn, planet, 2 
Saturninus (sat i3r nl' ni/s), 433 
Saul, king of Israel, 225, 1103 
Saul of Tarsus. (See Paul, St.) 
Savannah, 804, 830 
Savannah, steamship, 924 
Save, river, 488 
Savoy, 780. 792. 876, 918. 968 
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, 1007 
Saxony (and the Saxons). 482, 527, 589, 

613,616-21,626,630, 787, 792, 911. 

1111 
Saxony, Duke of. 711; Eleotor of. 758 
Sayce. Prof., 156, 199, 207 
Scandinavia, 75, 238, 462, 468, 476 
Scharnhorst, cruiser, 1042 
Scheldt, the, 640. 876 
Schism, the Great, 663, 687, 710, 1113 
Schleswig-Holstein, 968 
Schmalkalden, 760 
Schmalkaldic league, 760 
Schmidt. Dr.. 096 
Schmit, E.. 695 
Scholars, 348 

Schools, monastic, 624; public, 820 sq. 
Schurtz, Dr., 484, 584, 588 



Schwill, 602 

Schwyz (shvits), 753, 754, 1112 
Science, 341 sqq., 601, 730 sqq.; exploita- 
tion of, 927-29, 945; and religion, 507, 

732, 733, 957 
Science and Art Department, 964 
Scientific research, 729 
Scilly Isles, 162 
Scind (sind), 674 
Scipio, Lucius, 413 
Scipio, P. Cornelius, 408 
Scipio (sip'io), Afrieanus, the Elder, 

409-13, 415, 417, 429, 468 
Scipio Afrieanus Minor, 409, 415, 431 
Scipio Nasica (nd si' kd), 415, 431 
Scorpion, 21, 24 

Scorpion, sea. {See Sea-scorpion) 
Scotch colonists. 82 
Scotland, 45, 82, 83. 461, 605, 630, 664, 

720-22. 734, 735, 777-78, 795, 809. 

960, 997 
Scott, Michael. 653 
Scott, Sir Walter, 1011 
Scriptures, Arabic, 588; Christian, 547, 

554 
Scythia (sith' i d) and the Scythians, 190. 

202. 240. 268-69. 275-78. 320. 330. 

332. 422, 436-40, 462, 472-77, 486, 

630. 6S5. 672. 688, 910, 1104 
Sea, depth of, 3 
Sea fights, ancient. 285 
Sea power, ancient, 321-23, 592 
Sea trade. 740 
Seamanship, early. 155-59. 162, 164. 

208, 214, 741 sqq. 
Seas, primordial, 6, 7, 18, 19 
Sea-scorpion. 8, 20 
Seasons, the, 97, 99 
Seaweed, 19 

Secunderabad (se kiln d#r & bad'), 331 
Sedan, 972, 10.50 
Seeley, Sir J. R., 700-1 
Seine, the, 107 
Seleucia, 542 
Seleucid (se lu' sid) dynasty, 337-38, 

367, 371, 413, 452. 494. 537, 1105 
Seleucus (se lu' kite) I, 337, 369 
Selfishness, 365 
Selim (salem'), sultan, 6S5 
Seljuks (seljooks'), 599, 636-40, 667, 

674, nil. (.See a/so Turks) 
Semites (and Semitic peoples), 115, 

120-26, 157, 164. 172. 180, 185, 206, 

240, 567, 586, 666, 707, 726, 797 
Semitic languages. 120. 121. 129 
Seneca (sen' e kd). 422 
Senegal river. 164 



INDEX 



1165 



Sennacherib (se nak' ^r ib) , 139 40, 146, 

189, 229, 1103 
Sepulchre, Holy, 624, 630, 639, 642 
Sequoias (se kwoi' dz), 37 
Serapeum (ser d pe' Hm), 351-52, 708 
Serapis (sera' pis), 351-52, 367, 466, 

511-13, 523, 1108 
Serbia (and the Serbs), 457, 481, 527, 

537, 589, 682, 920, 1025, 1033-34, 

1043-45 
Serbian language, 238 
Serfdom, 521 
Sergius III, Pope, 626 
Serpent in religion, 100, 113, 953 
Servants, domestic, 207 
Set, Egyptian god, 180 
Seton-Karr, Sir H. W., 107 
Seven Years' War, 833, 1117 
Severus (se ver' its), Septimus, 456 
Seville, 744 
Sex, 102 
Shale, 5 

Shalmaneser (shal md ne' z^r), 139, 229 
Shamanism, 675, 689, 705 
Shamash, 188 
Shang dynasty, 142, 150 
Shanghai (shang hi'), 996 
Shang-tung, 994 
Shaving the face, 333 
Sheep in lake dwellings, 83 
Shekel, 165 

Sheldonian Theatre, 819 
Shell Age, supposed, 51 
Shellfish, 8 

Shells, as ornaments, 67 
Shem, 110 
Shen-si, 553 
Sherbro Island, 163 
Sherman, General, 970 
Shi Hwang-ti, emperor, 142, 151, 195, 

470, 473-74, 765, 1105 
Shiites (she' Its), 692-94, 628, 635-36, 

645, 694, 805 
Shiloh, 223 
Shimei, 225 
Shimonoseki (she' m^ no sek' e). Straits 

of, 993 
Shipbuilding, 631, 926 
Ships, earliest, 155-59 
Shishak (shi'shak), 146, 227 
Shrines, 177, 263 
Siam (and Siamese), 148, 561 
Siamese language, 123 
Siberia, 76, 123, 125, 462, 474, 552, 674, 

691, 809 
Siberian railway, 994, 1026 
Sicilies, Two, 755, 907 



Sicily, 158, 162, 253, 324, 381, 386-87, 
401-3, 412, 417, 428, 435, 482, 630, 
632, 642, 651-54, 662, 739, 896, 918, 
967, 1103 

Sickles, earthenware, 135 

Siddhattha Gautama (sid hat' t'ha gou'- 
ta ma). (.S'ee Buddha) 

Sidon, 158, 162, 208, 218, 228, 279, 322-25 

Sieyes (sya yes'), 898 

Sign-language, 117 

Sikhs (seks), 806, 981 

Silbury, 83, 105 

Silesia, 673, 801 

Silk, 214, 459, 789 

Silver as standard of value, 165 

Sin, idea of, 746 

Sind, 981 

Singan, 561-65, 1109 

Singing, 86 

Sinope (si no' pe), 542 

Siris, 288 

Sirius (sir' i lis), a star, 181 

Sirmium, 488 

Sistrum, 352 

Siva, 374 

Sivapithecus (si vd pi the' kus), 50 

Siwalik Hills, 50 

Skins, use of, as clothing, 64, 85; in- 
flated, as boats, 155 

Slate, 5 

Slavery (and slaves), 197-202, 256-61, 

307, 389, 422-23, 459, 512, 552, 598, 
691, 705, 748, 824, 832, 850 sgg.; Ameri- 
can, 886, 1119 

Slavic tribes, 456 

Slavonian dialect, 238 

Slavonic languages, 635 

Slavs, 537, 589, 613, 621, 626, 635, 689 

Sloth, 153 

Smelting, 78, 80 

Smerdis, 274 

Smilodon (smi' lo don), 43 

Smith, Elliot, 112, 113 

Smith, Rt. Hon. F. E., 958, 1021 

Smith, John, 828 

Smith, Worthington, 59 

Smithsonian Institution, 930 

Smyrna, 643 

Sobiesky (so byes' ki), John (John III), 

799, 1116 
Social Contract, 843, 856 
Social Democrats, 1010 
Social War, the, 433, 1 106 
Socialism, 855, 885-91, 940 sqq., 1119 
Society, beginning of human, 248 
Socrates (sok'rdtez), 85, 298, 300-2, 

308, 358, 375 



1166 



INDEX 



Boderini, 750 52, 1114 

Boissons, 612 

Solar year, 99 

Solent, the, 107 

Solferino (sol fere' no), battle of, 968, 
1119 

Soils, ensign, 772 

Solomon, King, 146, 224-32, 493, 1003 

Solon, 166, 273 

Solutre, 70, 94 

Solutrian Age, 267, 746 

Somaliland, 107, 126, 163 

Somalis, language of, 121 

Somersett, J., 852 

Somme, the, 107: battle of, 882, 1050 

Sonnino, Baron, 1068 

Sonoy, Governor, 772 

Soothsayers, 256 

Sophists, Greek, 298 

Sophocles (sof 6 klez), 298 

Soudan, tribes of, 88 

Soul, the, 102 

South Africa, 417, 986, 997, 999, 1013, 
1019, 1120 

South Sea Islanders, 51 

Southampton, 736 

Soviets (sov'yets), 946, 1048, 1060 

Sowing, and burial, 100; and human 
sacrifice, 104 

Space, 1, 12 

Spain, 71, 81, 111, 127, 142, 158, 162, 
381-83, 512, 536, 606, 664, 700, 718, 
735, 796; history {Carthaginians in), 
404-10; (Roma7is in), 412, 416, 
429-32, 439, 452, 468, 494; {Vandals 
in), 481, 484, 1108; {ujider the Goths), 
527, 621, 1108; {Moors in), 492, 589, 
624, 628, 750, 794, 1110: {15th-mth 
cent.), 742-43, 749-58, 762-63, {I7th- 
18th cent.), 767-73, 780, 783, 789, 794, 
801, 826, 1029; {19th cent.), 839, 916, 
972, 1029; overseas dominions, 154, 
744, 747; colonial expansion, 802-3, 
830, 833, 839, 853, 916, 977, 996 

Spanish language, 118, 491, 718, 747 

Sparta, 254-58, 281-84, 291, 297-99, 
312, 320 

Spartacus (spar' td k^ts), 435, 1106 

Species, 13, 17, 21, 107, 109 

Speech, development of, 54, 59, 93, 99, 
118, 129, 168-70 

Sphinx, the, 181 

Spices, Oriental, 806 

Spiders, early, 24 , 

Spinnerets of spiders, 24 

Spoleto (spo la' to), 531 

Spores, 20 



Spy, 54 

Stag, 73, 75 

Stagira (sta jir'd), 301 

Stalky and Co., 957 

Stambul (stam bool'), 685 

Stamp Acts, 835 

Stamps used for signatures, 347 

Stars, 1, 2; and early man, 97 

State, the, 420 sqq., 450, 752, 795, 950 

States-General, the, 785, 856-57, 1118 

Steam, use of, 924, 929 

Steamboat, introduction of the, 924 

Steam-engine, invention of, 825, 923, 
924 

Steam-hammer, 926 

Steam-power, 825 

Steel, 214, 326 

Stegosaurus (stSg d saw'riis), 27 

Stein, Freiherr von, 907 

Steno, 953 

Stettin, 736 

Stilicho (stil' i ko), 482, 488, 1108 

Stockholm, 1048 

Stockmar, Baron, 965 

Stoicism, 304, 307, 510 

Stone, early use of, 242 

Stone, Major-Gen., 1084 

Stone Age, 50, 52, 55, 60, 77, 83, 144, 
159, 215 

Stonehenge, 82, 83, 113, 142, 183, 242, 

1103 
Stopes, Dr. Marie, 25 
Story-telling, primitive, 99 
Strabo (stra'bo), 10 
Strafford, Earl of, 777-78, 1015 
Strata, geological, 6 
Strikes in ancient Rome, 391 
Stuart dynasty, 781 
Sturdee, Admiral, 1042 
Styria, 755 

Subiaco (soo be a' ko), 531 
Submarine warfare, 1042, 1049 
Sudan, the, 997 
Sudras, 211, 564 

Suetonius (su e to' ni Us), 454, 520 
Suevi (swe'vl), 482, 527, 1108 
Suez, 121, 143, 163 
Suffering, cause of, 361 
Suffrage, manhood, 843 
Sugar, 602 
Suleiman (soo la man'), the Magnificent, 

589, 594, 843, 845, 1110, 1114 
Sulla, 434-35, 441, 1106 
Sulphuric acid, 602 
Sulpicius (sitl pish' i Us), 434 
Sultan, Turkish, 492 
Sumatra, 680 



INDEX 



1167 



Sumer (incl. Sumeria and Sumerians), 
108, 135, 142, 148, 153-57, 172, 177, 
185-91, 196, 201, 215, 235, 257, 268, 
313 

Sumerian language and writing, 103, 
129, 135, 136, 144, 558 

Sun, the, 1, 2; worship, 100, 180, 352 

Sunday, 511, 708; schools, 933 

Sung dynasty, 555-57, 501, 668, 675, 1111 

Sunnites, 636, 645, 696 

"Sunstone," 112 

Superior Lake, 171 

Surrey, 864 

Susa, 135, 202, 274-78, 285-86, 307, 327- 
28, 332 

Sussex, 53, 605, 824 

Suy dynasty, 553 

Swabians, 611 

Swastika (swas' ti kd), 113, 246 

Sweden (and the Swedes), 75, 480, 526, 
616, 720, 761, 780, 785, 793-94, 799, 
802, 806, 816, 829, 911, 919 

Swedish language, 238 

Swift, Dean, 1017 

Swimming-bladder, 21 

Swine, keeping of, 736 

Switzerland (including the Swiss), 80, 82, 
87, 132, 152, 241, 491, 634, 759, 786, 
827, 864, 873, 883, 891, 903, 917, 1114, 
1118 

Swords, bronze, 101 

Sykes, Ella and Percy, 475 

Sykes, Sir Mark, 540, 572, 595, 682, 685 

Syndicalism, 945 

Syracuse, 299 

Syria (and Syrians), 75, 126, 139, 140, 
146, 193, 207, 218, 229-30, 274, 289, 
322, 537, 540-44, 567, 570-73, 585, 
636, 643, 661, 667, 674, 690, 691, 708, 
967, 1025 

Syrian language, 548, 600 



Tabriz, 680 

Tabu, 95 

Tachov (tak'hov), 711 

Tadpoles, 22, 39 

Taft, President, 1062, 1066 

Tagus valley, 762 

Tain, an Irish epic, 251 

Tai-tsung, 554, 561, 566-67, 667, 1109 

Talleyrand, 913 

Tallien, 880 

Tammany, 426 

Tancred, 644 

Tang dynasty, 550-57, 561, 607, 1109 

Tangier, 1009 



Tanks, 1038, 1044, 1084-85 

Tannenberg, 1038 

Taoism (ta' o izm), 372, 376 

Tapir, 43 

Tarentum, 386, 408 

Tarim (tarem), valley, 147, 1106 

Tarpeian Rock, 393 

Tarquins, the, 384, 390 

Tartar language, 123, 679 

Tartars (and Tartary), 330, 548, 669, 

673, 679, 689, 690, 795, 809, 816 
Tashkend, 562 
Tasmania (and Tasmanians), 62, 108, 

746, 979; language, 129 
Taurus mountains, 337-38, 589, 593, 

599, 607, 683, 769 
Taxation, 206, 260 
Taxilla, 564 
Tayf (tl'if), 573 
Taylor, H. O., 729 
Tea, 551, 838 
Teeth, 32, 52, 54, 65 
Telamon (tel'dmto), battle of, 404-7, 

1105 
Telegraph, electric, 925 
Tei-el-Amarna (tel el a mar' na), 146, 

165, 188, 227 
Telescope, invention of the, 732 
Tell, William, 754 
Tempe (tem' pe), vale of, 283 
Temples, 137, 177-85, 192, 255 
Ten Thousand, Retreat of the, 1104 
Ten Tribes, 139 
Teneriffe, 780 
Tennyson, Lord, 246, 964 
Testament, Old, 85, 217, 230, 233; New, 

85 
Tetrabelodon (tet rd bel' 6 ddn), 41 
Teutonic Knights, 816 
Teutonic tribes, 231, 439, 456, 491, 1108 
Texel, 876 

Textile fabrics, Arab, 602 
Thames, the, 107, 739, 786, 1036 
Thatcher, 602 
Thebes (thebz) and Thebans, 215, 254, 

284, 313-14, 1103 
Themistocles (the mis' to klez), 263, 285 
Theocrasia, 351, 352, 466, 512, 708 
Theodora, Empress, 536 
Theodora, sister of Marozia, 626 
Theodore of Tarsus, 614, 1110 
Theodoric (the od' 6 rik) the Goth, 487, 

527, 602, 1108 
Theodosius (the 6 do' shi Us), the Great, 

482, 524, 1108 
Theriodont (the' ri o dont) reptiles, 40 
I Theriomorpha, 28 



1168 



INDEX 



ThermopyliB (ther mop' i le), 283, 1104 

Theseus (the'sus), 161 

Thespians, 284 

Thessalus (thes' d Iws), 388 

Thessaly (and Thessalians), 326,387. 141 

Thibet, 371, 549 

Thien Shan, 474, 562 

Thiers (tyar), 801 

Thirty Tyrants, 299 

Thirty Years' War, 786, 812, 839, 1034 

Thomas, Albert, 965 

Thompson, R. Campbell, 135 

Thor, 613 

Thoth-lunus (thoth' lu' niis), Egyptian 

god, 182 
Thothmes (thoth'mez), 145, 228, 267, 

342, 1102 
Thought and research, 304, 949 
Thrace (thras) and Thracians, 253, 277- 

78, 288, 314, 320, 337, 585, 638 
Three Teachings, the, 375 
Throwing sticks, 69 
Thucydides (thu sid' i dez), 292 
Thuringians, 616 
Tian Shan, 474 
Tiber, river, 382, 391, 606 
Tiberius Caesar, 452, 496, 507, 1106 
Tibet, 152, 376, 473, 513. 501, 674, 688, 

811, 990, 1120 
Tibetan language. 123 
Tides, 5 

Tiger, sabre-toothed, 43, 48, 52, 57 
Tiglath Pileser (tig' lath pi le'zgr) I. 138, 

142; III, 229, 268, 1103 
Tigris, 132, 138, 156, 181, 202, 537, 568, 

667 
Tii, Queen, 192 
Tille, Dr., 741 
Tilly, 746 

Tilsit, Treaty of, 907, 1118 
Time, 12, 98, 99, 1102 
Times, the, 941 
Timon (ti' mdn), 444 
Timurlane, 692, 697, 809, 1113 
Tin, 2, 79. 80. 163. 214, 927 
Tinstone, 79 
Tiryns (tl' rinz) , 254 
Titanothere (ti' tan (5 thSr), 39, 43 
Titus, 255, 495, 1106 
Tobacco, 240, 828, 831 
Toe, great, 48 
Tonkin, 994, 996 
Torr, Cecil, 157, 200 
Tortoises, 28, 32 
Torture, use of, 882 
Tory Party, 1013 
Toulon, 878, 893-94 



Tours, 736 

Towers of Silence, 546 

Town life, European, 735 sqg. 

Townshend, General, 1044 

Township, primitive, 197 

Tracheal tubes, 21 

Trachodon (trak' o don), 30 

Trade, early, 88, 154-67, 199, 205; 

routes, 737; sea, 739 
Trade Unions, 419, 463, 943 
Tradition, 42, 94-99, 174 
Trafalgar, battle of, 905, 1118 
Trajan (tra' jfifn), 454-5 ', 538, 568, 1106 
Transmigration of souls, 363-65 
Transport, 924, 1083 
Transubstantiation, 70:^ 
Transvaal, 958, 986, 1120. {See also 

South Africa) 
Transylvania, 455, 673 
Tra.simere, Lake, 408 
Travels, early, 166, 924 
Trees, 22 

Trench warfare, 1037 
Trent, Council of, 724, 1115 
Tresas, 284 
Trevithick, 924 
Trianon, the, 863 
Tribal system, 24, 688 
Trilo'bites, 8, 18 
Triceratops (tri ser' d tops), 30 
Trieste, 971 
Trigonometry, 602 
Trinidad, 998 
Trinil, 51, 52 
Trinitarians, 515, 523 
Trinity, doctrine of the, 499, 516, 593 
Trinity College, Dublin, 1016 
TripoH, 840, 997, 1025. 1121 
Trojans, 161, 382 
Troltsch, 525 
Trotsky, 947 

Troy, 161, 254, 268, 283, 381 
Troyes (trwa), battle of, 486, 1108 
Trumpet, bronze, 101 
Tsar, title of, 492 

Tshushima (tsoo she' ma), Straits of, 994 
Ts'i (dynasty and state), 151, 439 
Ts'in (dynasty and state), 1 1, 195 
Tuaregs, 121, 152 
Tuileries, 865-66, 872-73 
Tulip tree, 37 
Tunis, 403, 648, 996 
Turanian language. (See Ural-Altaic 

languages) 
Turanians, 125, 548, 594, 632, 682 
Turkestan. 120, 126, 152, 214, 267, 

328, 330, 366, 371, 474, 479, 525. 539, 



INDEX 



1169 



547, 548, 563. 583, 589, 598, .636, 670, 
674, 681, 687, 691, 811, 1105, 1109 

Turkey. 762. 909. 920, 967, 974, 1007, 
1024, 1025, 1043-44, 1045, 1077, 1120. 
(See atso Turks) 

Turkey, Great, 674 

Turkhan Pasha, 1070 

Turkish fleet, 700; language and Utera- 
ture. 123. 548, 682; peoples, 470. 494, 

548, 636, 699, 811 (see also Turks); 
princes, 684 

Turko-Finnic language, 635 
Turko-Finnish peoples, 486, 527 
Turkomans, 479, 691, 811, 997 
Turks, 330. 478, 539. 547-48. 563. 589. 

599, 667, 681, 1109; and the Crusades, 

642 sqq.; Ottoman, 536. 681 sqq., 697. 

699, 740-41, 749, 752, 755, 759-63, 

783. 792, 799, 896. 1114-16; Seljuk, 

636-39, 674, 682, 1111 
Turtles, 28, 32 
Tuscany, 779, 787, 792 
Tusculum, 405 

Tushratta, King, 138, 146, 188 
Twelve Tables, the, 392, 419 
Tyler, Watt. 715. 1113 
Tylor, E. B.. 102 
Tyndale. Bible of. 221 
Tyrannosaurus (tl ran d saw' tub), 29 
TjTants. 258 
Tyre, 142, 157, 162, 202, 206, 208, 218. 

232, 279, 321-26, 331, 401, 495-96, 

704, 795 
Tyrol, 832, 1080 



U 



Uganda, 152, 616, 985 

Uhud, battle of, 514 

Uigurs (we' goorz), 670 

Uintathere (ii in' id ther), 39, 43 

Ukraine Cossacks, 809 

Ukrainia (and Ukrainians), 689. 795 

Ulm, 1118 

Ulster, 32, 960, 1014-23 

Uncleanness, 96. 101 

"Unionist" party, 1019 

United Provinces. (See Holland) 

United Service Institution, 1081, 1084 

United States, 473, 840, 844; constitu- 
tion, 840 sq., 859, 916, 1117; political 
and social conditions, 209. 258. 424, 
839, 842, 883, 886. 924. 933. 1065; 
slavery in, 749. 839; Declaration of 
Independence, 839, 1117; treaty with 
Britain, 840-41, 1117; Civil War, 965, 
1119; modern foreign policy of, 1027- 



31; in Great War, 1049, 1062, 1076. 

(See also America) 
Universal History, the, 953 
Universal law, 768 
Universals, 731 , 
Universe, 952 

Universities, 601, 653, 726, 819, 927 
University Commission, 964 
Unterwalden (oon' ter val den), 754 
Ur, 141 

Ural mountains, 119 
Ural-Altaic languages, 123, 150, 239, 243; 

people, 487 
Uranus (ur' a nus), 2 
Urban II, Pope, 637, 638, 648, 662, 724, 

1111 
Urban VI (pope), 663. 1113 
Uri. 754 
Urns, 86 
Uruk, 141 

Urumiya (u ru me' ya), lake, 268 
Ussher, Bishop, 953 

Usury, 207 i 

Utica (u' ti kfJ), 158 
Utopias, 300, 302, 766 
Utrecht, 770 



Vaisyas (vis' yaz), 211 

Valais, 491 

Valenciennes, 1050 

Valens, Emperor, 481 

Valerian, Emperor, 458, 538, 1107 

Valladolid, 762, 764 

Valmy, battle of, 875, 1118 

Valona, 1045 

Value, 164, 165 

Van, 268 

Vandals, 467, 481, 484, 492. 527 589, 
1107 

Varangians (vd rS,n' ji dnz), 631 

Varennes (varen'), 868-71, 1118 

Varro, 408 

Vasa (va' sd), Gustava, 784 

Vatican, 622, 649, 663 

Vedas (v&' ddz), 243, 251, 806 

Vegetarians, 251, 356 

Vegetation, 26 

Veii (ve'yl), 384, 393,417 

Vendee, 879, 894 

Venetia, 968, 971, 1049 

Venezuela, 1029 

Venice (and the Venetians), 641, 645, 
660, 678, 680, 685. 700. 736, 739, 741, 
895, 918, 1049, 1112, 1113, 1118 



1170 



INDEX 



Venus, goddess, 613 

Venus, planet, 2, 3 

Vera Cruz, 970 

Verbal tradition, 175 

Verde, Cape, 1114 

Verde, Cape, Islands, 744 

Verdun, 873, 875, 1032 

Verona, 736, 876 

Versailles, 788, 792, 798, 858-68, 972, 

1002, 1071; Peace of, 1076 sto.. 1121 
Verulam, Lord. (See Bacon, fir Francis) 
Vespasian (ves pa' zhi an), 456, 463, 496, 

1106 
Vessels of stone, 159 
Vesuvius, 435 
Via Flaminia, 404 
Victims, human, 512 
Victor Emmanuel, 968, 1119 
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 783, 

963, 965, 981, 1007, 1011, 1119, 1120 ' 
Victory, flagship, 905 
Vienna, 760, 799, 914, 1009, 1114, 1116; 

Congress of, 913, 916, 918, 963, 1118 
Vigilius, 486 

Vikings (vik' ings), 617, 631 
Village, the, 82, 198 
Vilna, 924, 1041 
Vimeiro (ve ma' e ro), 907 
Vinci (vin'che), Leonardo da, 461, 953, 

1044, 1114 
Vindhya (viad' ya) mountains, 357 
Vinland, 741 
Virgil, 382, 460 
Virginia, 829, 831, 835, 839, 843, 847, 

851, 852, 970 
Virtue, 298 
Vise, 1035 
Vishnu, 249, 374 

Visigoths, 476, 481, 486, 527, 1108 
Vistula, 673 
Vitelius, 456, 1106 
Vittoria, ship, 744 
Viviparous animals, 40 
Vivisection, 343, 422 
Vocabulary of man, 118 
Volga, 120, 126, 371, 487, 527, 816 
Volscians, 392 
Volta, 925 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 791, 792, 813. 815, 

956, 1116 
Votes, 707 
Vowels, 254 
Voyages, 162-63 
Vulgate, the, 527 



W 



Wages, 199, 714 



Wagons, 243 

Waldenses, 656, 657 

Waldo, 656, 657 

Wales, 155, 527, 605, 735 

Walid (waled') I, 593, 1110 

Walid II, 595, 1110 

Wallace, William, 735 

Wallenstein, 786 

Walpole, Sir Robert, 7S1 

War, Great. {See Great War) 

War and warfare, 198, 242, 312, 314, 785, 

959, 1000, 1005, 1036 
War of American Independence, 839 sqq. 
Warsaw, 920 
Warwick, Lord, 777 

Washington, 450, 827, 847, 900, 930, 970 
Washington, George, 839, 847, 849, 853, 

897 
Water, 19, 824 
Waterloo, 914, 1118 
Watt, James, 824. 923, 929 
Weale, Putnam, 990 
Weapons, 58, 80, 85, 151, 1103 
Weaving, 78 

Wedmore, Treaty of, 619 
Wei dynasty, later. 554 
Wei-hai-wei (wa hi wa'), 989, 994 
Wellesley, Marquis. (.See Mornington, 

Lord) 
Wellesley, Sir Arthur. (See Wellington, 

Duke of) 
Wellington, Duke of, 907, 914 
Wells, J.. 392, 403 
Welsh, the, 795 
Welsh language, 238 
Were-wolf, 93 
Wessex, 605, 616, 1110 
Western civilization, 557 
Westmin.ster, 397, 420, 737. 776. 780, 782 
Westphalia, Peace of, 773, 786, 827 
Whales, 28 
Wheat, 84, 131 
Whigs, 835 

White Man's Burthen, 988 
Whitehall, 777, 779, 1081 
Wilberforce, Bishop, 955 
Wilhelm I, German Emperor, 1007 
Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 624, 

1006-11, 1120 
Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany, 

1010 
Will and obedience, 707 
William I, etc., Emperors of Germany. 

{See Wilhelm) 
William the Conqueror. 347, 631, 1111 
William III, Prince o^ Orange, 781, 1015, 

1116 



INDEX 



1171 



William IV, King of England, 783 

William the Silent, 770 

Williams, Harold, 635 

Williams, S. Wells, 470 

Wilson, W., President of U.S.A., 776, 

1062, 1064, 1065-72, 1076, lOSO 
Wiltshire, 83 

Winckler, H., 141, 290-94 
Windsor, 777 
Wine, 829 
Wiriath, 857 
Wisby, 736 
Witchcraft, 96, 316 
Wittenberg, 758, 1114 
Wolfe, General, 805, 1117 
Wolsey, Cardinal, 757 
Wolves, 52, 383 

Women, 193, 260, 5V9, 721, 847 
Wood, 57 

Wood blocks, for printing, 718 
Woollen industry, 824 
Workmen, 943 
World (geographical), 287, 344, 744, 

747; (political), 340, 827, 919, 922, 

976 
World, Old, nursery of mankind, 76 
World dominion (and unity), 340, 341, 

637, 654, 796, 797, 802, 811 
Worms, Diet of, 758, 1114 
Worship, 100 
Worth (vert), 972 
Wright, W. B., 74, 90 
Writing, 137, 144, 154, 160, 168-80, 

244, 245, 359, 558, 624 
Written word, 232 
WuTi, 475, 1106 
Wu Wang, 150 
Wurtemberg, 75, 971 
Wycliffe, John, and his followers, 659, 

664, 709, 715, 758, 819, 821, 1113 



X 



Xavier (za' vi er), Francis, 991 
Xenophon, 290, 299, 301, 306 
Xerxes (zerk' sez), 282-89, 306, 327. 470, 
682, 1104 

Y 
Yanbu, 554 
Yang-chow, 679 



Yang-tse valley, 151, 470 

Yang-t.se-kiang (yang tsa ke ang'), 147 

Yarkand, 549, 1107 

Yarmuk, 584, 1109 

Year, Moslem, 574; solar, 99 

Yeast, 242 

Yedo bay, 992 

Yeliu Chutsai, 672 

Yemen, 539, 568, 570 

York, 458, 776 

Yorkshire, 713 

Yorktown, 839 

Ypres (e' pr), 770, 1037, 1039 

Yuan Chwang, 470, 561 sqq., 588, 598, 

666, 680, 1109 
Yuan dynasty, 675, 677, 688, 1118 
Yucatan, 154, 747 
Yueh-Chi, 474, 548, 561, 1105 
Yugo-Slavia (and Yugo-Slavs), 537, 681, 

918 sq., 1009, 1079 
Yuste (yoos' ta), 762, 764 



Zadok, 225 

Zaid (za'id), 577 

Zainib, 577 

Zama (za' md), 409-12, 415, 1105 

Zanzibar, 743 

Zara, 645 

Zarathustra (za rd thoos' trd). (See Zo- 
roaster) 

Zebedee, 503 

Zeid (zld), a slave, 572 

Zend .\ vesta, 545 

Zenobia, 464, 538, 1107 

Zeppelin raids, 1041 

Zeus (zus), 338, 351 

Zeuxis (zuk' sis), 312 

Zimbabwe (zem bab' wa), 984 

Zinc, 80 

Ziska, 710 . 

Zodiac, 183 

Zollverein (tsol' fer in), 1012 

Zoroaster (z6 ro as' ter) and Zoroastri- 
anism, 462, 465, 538, 545, 547, 570, 
581, 594 

Zoroastrian language, 547 

Zosimus (zos' i miis), 521 

Zulus, 164, 313 

Zyp, the, 771 



l-BAg?9 



\\ 



( \ 



